Bash script: difference in minutes between two times

Question

I have two time strings; eg. \"09:11\" and \"17:22\" on the same day (format is hh:mm). How do I calculate the time difference in minutes between these two?

Can the

Answer 1

@Dorian
If you just want to know how long a program took to run: time, man, man time!

Trivial example:

jonathan@Odin:~$ time sleep 1

real    0m1.001s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

OK, it doesn't give the result in seconds, but you can make it do so with a format string, or more simply with the POSIX compliance option:

jonathan@Odin:~$ time -p sleep 20
real 20.00
user 0.00
sys 0.00