Question

I’d like to test the speed of a bash script and a Python script. How would I get the time it took to run them?

Answer 1

If you’re on Linux (or another UN*X), try time:

The time command runs the specified program command with the given
arguments. When command finishes, time writes a message to standard
error giving timing statistics about this program run. These statis-
tics consist of (i) the elapsed real time between invocation and termi-
nation, (ii) the user CPU time (the sum of the tms_utime and tms_cutime
values in a struct tms as returned by times(2)), and (iii) the system
CPU time (the sum of the tms_stime and tms_cstime values in a struct
tms as returned by times(2)).

Note that you need to eliminate outer effects – e.g. other processes using the same resources can skew the measurement.