How do i obtain the number of seconds my shell has been running?

pangolinsos

On the command line it show how long in seconds, you have been running the shell.

$ echo $SECONDS

This can be useful in bash shell scripts and one way of performing loops that are time dependant, In the shell script you can do one thing, wait for a number of seconds, hen do something else.

sleep is just used to demo the delay between the seconds.

#!/bin/bash

sleep 5
echo $SECONDS

export SECONDS=0
sleep 5
echo $SECONDS

Running the script.

$ ./seconds.sh
5
5