Hi all: I'm trying to determine how long an system operation takes. Anyone know of a simple way to do this ? I wanted to establish the start time. Then run the operation. Then mark the finish time. Then substract the start time from the finish time to get an elapsed time. Here's the simplistic approach I tried. I'm sure I need a time that is measured in seconds or something like that, but I'm not sure how to do this. Here's what I tried: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings;
use strict;

my $start = "Tue Jan 27 15:40:16 2004";
print "This is the start time: $start \n";

system (This is where the system process stuff goes); 

my $finish = localtime;
print "This is the finish time: $finish \n";

my $elapsedtime = ("$finish" - "$start") ;
print "This is the time diff: $elapsedtime \n";

The above obviously didn't work.  Here's what it returned:

This is the start time: Tue Jan 27 15:40:16 2004 
Argument "Tue Jan 27 15:40:16 2004" isn't numeric in subtraction (-) a
+t 
C:\Perl\timetest.pl line 13.
This is the finish time: Tue Jan 27 19:45:56 2004 
This is the time diff: 0 
Argument "Tue Jan 27 19:45:56 2004" isn't numeric in subtraction (-) a
+t 
C:\Perl\timetest.pl line ClearCase\Us

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PS. I can't use modules so I will have to do it that way , can someone advice please thanks

In reply to elapsed times by Anonymous Monk

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