Command to get time in milliseconds

Question

Is there a shell command in Linux to get the time in milliseconds?

Answer 1

date command didnt provide milli seconds on OS X, so used an alias from python

millis(){  python -c "import time; print(int(time.time()*1000))"; }

OR

alias millis='python -c "import time; print(int(time.time()*1000))"'

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EDIT: following the comment from @CharlesDuffy. Forking any child process takes extra time.

$ time date +%s%N
1597103627N
date +%s%N  0.00s user 0.00s system 63% cpu 0.006 total

Python is still improving it's VM start time, and it is not as fast as ahead-of-time compiled code (such as date).

On my machine, it took about 30ms - 60ms (that is 5x-10x of 6ms taken by date)

$ time python -c "import time; print(int(time.time()*1000))"
1597103899460
python -c "import time; print(int(time.time()*1000))"  0.03s user 0.01s system 83% cpu 0.053 total

I figured awk is lightweight than python, so awk takes in the range of 6ms to 12ms (i.e. 1x to 2x of date):

$ time awk '@load "time"; BEGIN{print int(1000 * gettimeofday())}'
1597103729525
awk '@load "time"; BEGIN{print int(1000 * gettimeofday())}'  0.00s user 0.00s system 74% cpu 0.010 total