Monitoring CPU Process Usage

[Duane Attaway]

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, Scott Bowling wrote:

> Would it be possible to write some sort of process monitoring system
> that is capable of retrieving this information after the process ends
> (or maybe right before the process ends)?

There is a nifty little utility called time.  It calculates resources used 
by the following program.  For example, if I wanted to know how much time 
it took to check my disk usage:

dattaway at satellite portage $ time df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             28241692  21261976   5545112  80% /
tmpfs                     1024       196       828  20% /mnt/.init.d
attaway.net:/        157076808 128794768  20302960  87% /t

real    0m0.078s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

It took 78 milliseconds of time between invocation and termination.  CPU 
and SYS time were insignificant in this case.  You can even format time's 
output any way you wish for scripting.  More about this from the man page.

I often build the kernel followed by the time command to see how long it 
takes:

cd /usr/src/linux
time make bzImage

If I remember right, VMS did this sort of stuff when you submitted jobs.  
Pretty cool.