Quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac Terminal

You can create an instant quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac OS X command line by launching Terminal and typing: time cat , then hit enter and the stopwatch begins, you can stop the count by hitting Control-C, which will return something back that looks like this:

$ time cat
^C
real 0m5.905s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.003s


The top ‘real’ number is the time that passed since executing the command. How this stopwatch works is you are using the ‘time’ command to time how long another command takes to execute, but since cat requires something to output and we are not providing any, cat does nothing, creating a simple stopwatch.