Re: Bug/limitation in 'time'

[Bob Proulx]

Bruce Dawson wrote:
> The man page is clear that it is displaying the results of wait3().

Man page for time?  You mean the time section of the man page for
bash.  If you are looking at the time man page then you are looking at
the standalone /usr/bin/time command and not the bash builtin time
command.  There is also the 'help time' bash builtin help.  If you are
simply using "time foo" then you will be using the builtin version and
should be looking at the bash man page for information about it.

To be clear there are two time commands.

  $ type -a time
  time is a shell keyword
  time is /usr/bin/time

If you type in 'time' then you get the shell keyword and the bash
builtin version.  If you type in 'command time' or '/usr/bin/time'
then you get the external standalone version.  If you try them you
will see that the default behavior of each is quite different.  Using
the "-p" option will force the portable format so that they will
produce similar formats.

The overlap of external standalone programs and shell builtin
functionality is an often confused item.  Same thing for 'test' and
'[' for example.

Bob