Re: Potentially misleading documentation of SECONDS variable

[Martin D Kealey]

The fundamental problem of using phrases like "the run time of the current
process" is that there's NO POSSIBLE adjectival qualifier that can be added
to such a phrase such that the combination correctly describes the actual
operation.

What's needed is a statement that the value of SECONDS is the  current
system time, minus the system clock when the process started or a value was
last assigned, plus whatever value was assigned (if any), with each of
reading of the system clock taken at whole second resolution.

-Martin

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024, 17:54 Bash-help via Bug reports for the GNU Bourne
Again SHell, <bug-bash@gnu.org> wrote:

> On 15 August 2024 08:57:42 CEST, felix <felix@f-hauri.ch> wrote:
> >The variable $SECOND won't intend to be exact to the nanoseconds!
> >
> If you have read the thread you should know that this fact is already
> established.
>
> >[...] This variable is intended to show current
> >time of execution, at SECOND resolution.
> >
> The problem I saw, and lifted here, was that this is not the case, is it?
> The examples provided earlier in the mail thread clearly show that I can
> have I script run for i.e. 0.1 second and the $SECONDS variable show 1
> second has passed. This is WRONG, by all possible interpretations. A minor
> change in the documentation would make the behaviour understandable and
> acceptable, which I think is a good way forward.
>