tis - Timestamp command output

Introduction

tis helps you measure running time of an application. tis prepends timestamp in μs (the time spent before printing the line) to each line in stdout of another command.

Please note that there can always be a noise of several 100μs even when run on a free fast machine.

If we try to use bash built-in to measure time, we get similar noise: 

echo $EPOCHREALTIME; read -t 0.01; \
echo $EPOCHREALTIME; echo $EPOCHREALTIME

After we discount the time required for consecutive echo, there's still often several 100μs of noise plus the timeout of read command shall not be accurate (so we may not be measuring 0.01 seconds with a precision of 1μs).

tis doesn't count the CPU time spend by itself. So time spend printing the line itself shall not be counted. Thus, you shall see that the time for bash built-in echo command shall be close to 0.

tis is similar to the ts from moreutils (when run as ts -i "%.s"). I wrote tis because ts output was unreliable for measuring smaller time frame - especially during the first few lines.

Source: GitLab

Build and Install

## Install dependencies
# Debian and derivatives
sudo apt install -y gcc meson

# Fedora and derivatives
sudo dnf install -y gcc meson

## Build
# 'build' used below is a non-existing directory
# name.  You may use any name of your choice.
meson setup build
cd build && ninja

## Install
sudo ninja install

Running tis

Once you install tis you can pipe other applications to tis: 

# Measure time spent before printing 'hi'
(echo hi; read -t 0.1; echo hi) | tis

# Same as above, but show time only if greater than 1ms
(echo hi; read -t 0.1; echo hi) | tis -m 1

# Show help
tis -h

See also

  • ts from moreutils
    • you can get similar output with ts -i "%.s" - though it's a bit less accurate.
  • hyperfine
  • ets

License

Written in 2024 by Mohammed Sadiq <sadiq@sadiqpk.org>

To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.

You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software. If not, see the license online.