How can I see the running time of the terminal? (Ubuntu user)

Question

So I began working in terminal (with tmux) this morning and forgot the hour when I began. I need to know the time when I started the terminal (or tmux) or the running time of the terminal (or tmux).

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Answer 1

ps -eo '%t %c' | grep tmux

should give you the running time of your tmux. Of course, you can also grep for your terminal process directly.

Answer 2

If you're setting $PS1 in .bashrc, you can incorporate the date command into this variable--if you do this in the simplest way, it will show you the time you started the shell. If you want to show both the time you started, you can mix that technique with the one described here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x279.html

Again, the simple version:

PS1="Shell started at `date` \$ "

The complex version might start with that, but end with running another date invocation. Obviously, you want to tune the arguments to show a more reasonable time, like date +'%H:%M:%S'

Edit: Both the start time and the current time use command substitution (to run a command and get the string). The difference is when they are run--the former is run when the shell starts, and the latter is run at every prompt. The latter version is escaped with a backslash, so the command substitution is not executed immediately (but rather, it's executed every time the prompt shows).