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chronos

A better time utiltity for Windows that takes into account children times.

Rationale

I needed a program that can run another program and report its wallclock, user and system times on Windows, similar to what time utility does on POSIX systems (Linux/BSD). There was nothing like this preinstalled on Windows, and alternatives found on the Web were either defunct or flawed. I needed something to be able to sum times of the process and its children. A simple GetProcessTimes() WinAPI call was not enough for that.

Ultimately, I had to write it myself. On Windows/DOS, time.exe name is already occupied by an unrelated system utility; therefore, I called my program chronos.

I tried to make the program mimic time output found on Linux.

Building

For those who might need it, I included a Visual Studio 2015 project file. Essentially, the compilation can be done with a single command:

cl.exe /D _CONSOLE /D UNICODE /D _UNICODE /EHsc chronos.cpp

Do not forget to run vcvarsall.bat beforehand. I was able to build chronos with Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2010, both x86 and x64 architectures.

Running

Usage: chronos.exe [-v] [-o file] [--] program [options]

Run program and report its resources usage
--verbose, -v          produce results in verbose forma
--output, -o filename  write result to filename instead
program                program name to start
options                the program's own arguments

Bugs and Limitations

  • Not tested much. It works for my programs, but can fail for yours.
  • The utility does not wait for all children to terminate; it only monitors the parent process.
  • Possibly because of the previos note, some processes, like explorer.exe, escape the control of chronos immediately after start. For such programs, reported times will be incorrect
  • No full compatibility with POSIX time. In fact, no output formatting is supported.
  • No I18N whatsoever.

Links

  1. The discusion at the StackOverflow thread.