You can use the time command to measure the time it takes a command (or a program) to finish executing. The general syntax for the time command is as follows:
time command_or_program
For example, to measure how long it takes for the date command to finish executing, you can run the following command:
root@ubuntu-linux:~# time date
Sun Nov 3 16:36:33 CST 2019
real 0m0.004s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.000s
It just took four milliseconds to run the date command on my system; this is quite fast!
The gzip compression method is the fastest of all three compression methods; well, let's see if I am lying or telling the truth! Change to the /root/backup directory:
root@ubuntu-linux:~# cd /root/backup
root@ubuntu-linux:~/backup#
Now let's see how long it takes to create a gzip-compressed archive file for all the files in /boot:
root@ubuntu-linux:~/backup# time tar -czf boot.tar.gz /boot
real 0m4.717s
user 0m4.361s
sys 0m0.339s
On my system, it took gzip 4.717 seconds to...