how to capture file read time?

[thevizard]

Hi, here is what I'm looking for. I have 5 files in a directory, say file1, file2,...,file5.

I want to read the complete contents of all the 5 files and capture the time it took to read all 5 files.

Basically, I'm trying to do a read performance test with 5 files that shows the time it took to read the 5 files.

Please help...

thanks

[atreyu]

Whatever you mean by "reading the files" is vague, but I assume you know what you need to do there. Just put the command to read the files in a function, then use the bash builtin-in time to tell you how long the entire process took, e.g.:

#!/bin/sh
files='file1 file2 file3 file4 file5'
readfiles(){
for file in $files; do
  echo reading file $file
  # do some command to 'read' the file
done
}
time readfiles

[thevizard]

by reading, i mean open a file and then close it one by one for all 5 files. how would I do that?

[atreyu]

if it is a text file, you could simply cat it. if you don't care to see the output, just redirect STDOUT/STDERR to /dev/null, e.g.:

cat file >/dev/null 2>&1