UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am wondering why big O notation is not being emphasized in shell script context. But its almost discussed in all OOP languages,
Please shed your thoughts,

Thanks

Shell sits on top of so much other stuff, that anything that would merit O notation would already be in a low level language where you can directly control all of the "stuff", like I/O, buffering, memory ordering, etc.

Shell also suffers from performance degradation when coders are oblivious to the cost of process creation - e.g., writing loops that iterate over a miilion lines of a file, with dozens of external commands embedded, instead of using builtins and keywords.

So how we can measure the performance of a script in general?

One parameter would be to measure the time taken to run the script.

Big O notation does not in itself provide you with any useful performance information; it's merely one characteristic of an algorithm's complexity.

O(n) is usually better than O(n^2), but if you're working on a small data set and the O(n) approach requires some expensive setup to begin, the O(n^2) solution could be the better choice.

In the end, you need to test the code with what will be a typical workload, under typical operating conditions, on typical hardware.

Regards,
Alister

Do we have any shell built in feature to measure the execution time of a script rather than manually monitoring ?

time

Regards,
Alister