Timestamp your bash output

If you need to find out the time difference between bash outputs, you can use ts from the moreutils package.

To get started, you’ll need to install moreutils.

A simple apt-get install moreutils should do the trick.

Then all you need to do is to pipe your output to ts

Like:

echo -e "test\ntest\ntest" | ts

This will return a nice timestamp on each linebreak.

You can even customize the timestamp like:

echo -e "foo\nbar\nbaz" | ts '[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S]'
[2011-12-13 22:07:03] foo
[2011-12-13 22:07:03] bar
[2011-12-13 22:07:03] baz

References:

• Stackoverflow - Prepending a timestamp to each line of output from a command