Learning AWK Programming

The systime() function

The systime() function returns the current time of day as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight, January 1 1970, not counting leap seconds. This allows you to create a log file containing a timestamp using a seconds since the epoch format. This function can also be used to compare the timestamp with a file with the current time of day and for measuring how long a GAWK program takes to execute. The following example shows how the systime() function works:

$ vi systime.awkBEGIN    {    print "Timestamp of program run : ", systime()    LOOPS=10000000;    start=systime();    print start;    for (i=0;i<LOOPS;i++) {    }    end = systime();    print end;    totaltime = ( end -start )    print ("totaltime : ", totaltime)}$ awk -f systime.awk

The output ...