Question

Is there a simple way to time the execution of a command in PowerShell, like the ‘time’ command in Linux?
I came up with this:

$s=Get-Date; .\do_something.ps1 ; $e=Get-Date; ($e - $s).TotalSeconds

But I would like something simpler like

time .\do_something.ps1

Answer 1

Yup.

Measure-Command { .\do_something.ps1 }

Note that one minor downside of Measure-Command is that you see no stdout output.

[Update, thanks to @JasonMArcher] You can fix that by piping the command output to some commandlet that writes to the host, e.g. Out-Default so it becomes:

Measure-Command { .\do_something.ps1 | Out-Default }

Another way to see the output would be to use the .NET Stopwatch class like this:

$sw = [Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew()
.\do_something.ps1
$sw.Stop()
$sw.Elapsed