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.. _cmd-time:
time - measure how long a command or block takes
================================================
Synopsis
--------
docs synopsis: add HTML highlighing and automate manpage markup
Recent synopsis changes move from literal code blocks to
[RST line blocks]. This does not translate well to HTML: it's not
rendered in monospace, so aligment is lost. Additionally, we don't
get syntax highlighting in HTML, which adds differences to our code
samples which are highlighted.
We hard-wrap synopsis lines (like code blocks). To align continuation
lines in manpages we need [backslashes in weird places]. Combined with
the **, *, and `` markup, it's a bit hard to get the alignment right.
Fix these by moving synopsis sources back to code blocks and compute
HTML syntax highlighting and manpage markup with a custom Sphinx
extension.
The new Pygments lexer can tokenize a synopsis and assign the various
highlighting roles, which closely matches fish's syntax highlighing:
- command/keyword (dark blue)
- parameter (light blue)
- operator like and/or/not/&&/|| (cyan)
- grammar metacharacter (black)
For manpage output, we don't project the fish syntax highlighting
but follow the markup convention in GNU's man(1):
bold text type exactly as shown.
italic text replace with appropriate argument.
To make it easy to separate these two automatically, formalize that
(italic) placeholders must be uppercase; while all lowercase text is
interpreted literally (so rendered bold).
This makes manpages more consistent, see string-join(1) and and(1).
Implementation notes:
Since we want manpage formatting but Sphinx's Pygments highlighing
plugin does not support manpage output, add our custom "synopsis"
directive. This directive parses differently when manpage output is
specified. This means that the HTML and manpage build processes must
not share a cache, because the parsed doctrees are cached. Work around
this by using separate cache locations for build targets "sphinx-docs"
(which creates HTML) and "sphinx-manpages". A better solution would
be to only override Sphinx's ManualPageBuilder but that would take a
bit more code (ideally we could override ManualPageWriter but Sphinx
4.3.2 doesn't really support that).
---
Alternative solution: stick with line blocks but use roles like
:command: or :option: (or custom ones). While this would make it
possible to produce HTML that is consistent with code blocks (by adding
a bit of CSS), the source would look uglier and is harder to maintain.
(Let's say we want to add custom formatting to the [|] metacharacters
in HTML. This is much easier with the proposed patch.)
---
[RST line blocks]: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#line-blocks
[backslashes in weird places]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/8626#discussion_r782837750
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.. synopsis ::
time COMMAND
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Description
-----------
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.. only :: builder_man
NOTE: This page documents the fish keyword `` time `` .
To see the documentation on the `` time `` command you might have,
use `` command man time `` .
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`` time `` causes fish to measure how long a command takes and print the results afterwards. The command can be a simple fish command or a block. The results can not currently be redirected.
For checking timing after a command has completed, check :ref: `$CMD_DURATION <variables-special>` .
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Your system most likely also has a `` time `` command. To use that use something like `` command time `` , as in `` command time sleep 10 `` . Because it's not inside fish, it won't have access to fish functions and won't be able to time blocks and such.
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Example
-------
(for obvious reasons exact results will vary on your system)
::
>_ time sleep 1s
________________________________________________________
Executed in 1,01 secs fish external
usr time 2,32 millis 0,00 micros 2,32 millis
sys time 0,88 millis 877,00 micros 0,00 millis
>_ time for i in 1 2 3; sleep 1s; end
________________________________________________________
Executed in 3,01 secs fish external
usr time 9,16 millis 2,94 millis 6,23 millis
sys time 0,23 millis 0,00 millis 0,23 millis
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Inline variable assignments need to follow the `` time `` keyword::
>_ time a_moment=1.5m sleep $a_moment
________________________________________________________
Executed in 90.00 secs fish external
usr time 4.62 millis 4.62 millis 0.00 millis
sys time 2.35 millis 0.41 millis 1.95 millis
