mjhjmtu

I want to run an executable main and redirect all outputs to /dev/null, meanwhile I measure its runtime with time and write the results to runtime.out. Since the task is long I also have to run the whole thing with nohup.

I tried the following:

nohup time ./main &> /dev/null &> runtime.out &

This just outputs everything to runtime.out.
I don't need the output of main just the runtime, saved into a file.

time has something made to be used for this:

nohup time -o runtime.out ./main &> /dev/null &

If it was scripted and didn't require a tty, I'd rather use setsid than nohup + &, because it "daemonizes" better, and can still be sent a HUP signal if needed.

setsid time -o runtime.out ./main </dev/null &>/dev/null

Also note that here (as in OP's question) time is /usr/bin/time, which has a different output format than bash's builtin time command. It appears that /usr/bin/time --portability gives a similar output if needed.

Through some trial & error and stealing inspiration from bash time with nohup , I came up with the following:

$ nohup bash -c 'time ./main &> /dev/null' > runtime.out &
[1] 23178
nohup: ignoring input and redirecting stderr to stdout
$ 
[1]+ Done nohup bash -c 'time ./main &> /dev/null' > runtime.out
$ cat runtime.out 

real 0m0.004s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.002s

This will redirect stdout of time to runtime.out, print stdout of nohup to the terminal, and redirect stdout and stderr of main to /dev/null.

This appears to do the right thing:

$ time > runtime.out nohup ./main &> /dev/null &