how to time length of process invoked from the command line ?

[Craig Thomas]

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a simple way to determine how long any given command
takes to run when issued from the command line?  I've googled and turned
up lots of timing a process type results...but I've had no luck
recognizing a solution [poor google searches -- not sure what I'm
searching for really].  I'm creating some cron jobs for backups and just
want to schedule them far enough apart I'm not writing old data.

there's surely something like this that will do what I need:

#tar -czf ~/.evolution email.tar.gz | someapptotimemyprocess

Any help greatly appreciated.

TIA,

-- 
Craig Thomas <cjtinhp at optonline.net>