On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 14:30 +0800, John Summerfied wrote: > Craig Thomas wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > Does anyone know of a simple way to determine how long any given command > > takes to run when issued from the command line? I've googled and turned > > up lots of timing a process type results...but I've had no luck > > recognizing a solution [poor google searches -- not sure what I'm > > searching for really]. I'm creating some cron jobs for backups and just > > want to schedule them far enough apart I'm not writing old data. > > > > there's surely something like this that will do what I need: > > > > #tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz | someapptotimemyprocess > > > > Any help greatly appreciated. > > > > TIA, > > > time tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ Both of you have this reversed. The filename to be created comes right after the -f option, the files/directories to be tarred follow that.