What do 'real', 'user' and 'sys' mean in the output of time(1)?

Question

$ time foo
real        0m0.003s
user        0m0.000s
sys         0m0.004s
$

What do \'real\', \'user\' and \'sys\' mean in the output of time?

Answer 1

To expand on the accepted answer, I just wanted to provide another reason why real ≠ user + sys.

Keep in mind that real represents actual elapsed time, while user and sys values represent CPU execution time. As a result, on a multicore system, the user and/or sys time (as well as their sum) can actually exceed the real time. For example, on a Java app I'm running for class I get this set of values:

real    1m47.363s
user    2m41.318s
sys     0m4.013s