After many years a new 1.8 version of "time" tool was released. This version brings some noticable changes:
(1) License changed from (GPLv2+) to (GPLv3+ and GFDL).
(2) Additional exit codes are used to report meassured command failures and failures to execute the command.
(3) A meassured command failure is printed by default. See the first line:
$ ./time-1.8/time /usr/bin/false Command exited with non-zero status 1 0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1196maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (0major+55minor)pagefaults 0swaps
You can suppress the message by "-q" option:
$ ./time-1.8/time -q /usr/bin/false 0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1268maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (0major+55minor)pagefaults 0swaps
I consider the last change quite significant. Vanilla time used to print the failure message uncoditionally, but Fedora patched it to be visible only if "-v" option was specified. But 1.8 started to control the message by "-q" option. To follow the upstream, I dropped the patch.
This of course revealed that the failure message is printed by default even in POSIX mode ("-p" option) now:
$ ./time-1.8/time -p /usr/bin/false Command exited with non-zero status 1 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.00
I think this is a bug and patched the tool not to print the message in the POSIX mode either:
$ ./time-1.8/time -p /usr/bin/false real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.00
I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so blatantly.
-- Petr
On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 05:06:11PM +0000, Petr Pisar wrote:
I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so blatantly.
Let's land this in F28 (rawhide) and not update in F27. And make sure it gets in the release notes.
On 2017-11-08, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 05:06:11PM +0000, Petr Pisar wrote:
I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so blatantly.
Let's land this in F28 (rawhide) and not update in F27. And make sure it gets in the release notes.
Of course only F28 receives this upgrade.
The good thing is upstream accepted my patch and future upstream releases won't print the command failure message in the POSIX mode anymore.
I will file Fedora system-wide change, to get proper attention.
-- Petr