Time lets you put it before any other command, and will tell you how long it took to run stuff.
I find it very handy for benchmarking. And as a sysadmin, whenever anybody says something seems “slow,” you can keep it real with time:

# time cp bigfile bigfile.copy

Bam! You’ll show them slow. Run it on a baseline system. Run it on the “slow” system. That’s what’s up, thanks, time!

But what do you do on Windows? I had no idea. But the Internet is filled with people like me wondering, “is there something like the time command… for Windows?”

There is my friend! ntimer.exe:

# ntimer.exe [command]

Ntimer.exe unfortunately does not come included with XP. You can download it for free from microsoft.com in a bundle called “Windows 2003 resource kit.” It’s 11MB, and comes with a bunch of other stuff. The binary for ntimer.exe works fine on XP Professional.