How to time how long a program takes to run?

Hi

I have written a C program that is supposed to run in under 2 seconds. Is there a function in C that lets me time how long it takes to run the program?

Thanks

I often used clock() in time.h to get the time in millisecs. Only problem with that is that returns the number of clock cycles on linux so you have to divide it by CLOCKS_PER_SEC according to the manpage. Anyway its simple to use:

Code:

---

start_time = clock()
// do stuff
end_time = clock()
seconds_elapsed = (end_time - start_time) / 1000;

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Alternatively theres gettimeofday(), which is more precise.

On Linux I'd be using time anyway.

Code:

---

[ ~]$ time ./myprog

real        0m3.855s
user        0m0.057s
sys        0m0.297s

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Of course that method also counts how long your program takes to start.