Controlling "output" from UNIX time commmand

I have a problem controlling the output from the UNIX time command, for some strange reason the "output" (specifically the last 3 lines of the output) seems like it can only be directed to the screen, no matter what I do:


Take for example I tried this:




I then looked at the contents of the file timefile_1.txt and I saw this :




**********************************************************

So I experimented some more :




As you can see below the last 3 lines of the ls -ltr command has been redirected to the timefile_2.txt file, I need the above 3 lines from the time command




*********************************************************

My aim is to capture the results (all 3 results) of the time command (I need to do some arithmetic calculations on the values)

I'm working on a SunOS 5.9 Generic_112233-12 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440 server

why are you doing 'tail -3'?
this works fine for me [ksh on Solaris 7] - capturing both the 'ls' and the 'time' in the same file.
(time ls -l) 1> /tmp/time 2>&1

I don't want to capture the output from the ls -l command only the time. Thanx though for your suggestion.


This is what works :


(time ls -ltr) 2> time.txt 1>/dev/null

I have another question....would it be possible for me to manipulate the output of the time command without first dumping it to file ? The thing is, I really don't want to create the time.txt file. What I would want to do is isolate the two numeric sections of the output and store them in variables var1 and var2 respectively (note that this would be done inside a loop inside a ksh script):

The following commands isolates the numeric portions of the output that I want :


The output of the above command :



I would want to initially store 0 in var1 and 0.008 in var2 so I could do some other calculations.

Ok I think I figured out how to avoid writing the output to a file :






Gives the following output :

Hey thanx....that code seems better.