A Better Time Utility Implementation for Windows
I needed a program that can run another program and report its
wallclock, user and system times on Windows, similar to what time
utility does on POSIX systems (Linux/BSD). There was nothing like this
preinstalled on Windows, and alternatives found on the Web were either
defunct or flawed. I needed something to be able to sum times of the
process and its children. A simple GetProcessTimes() WinAPI call was
not enough for that.
Ultimately, I had to write it myself. On Windows/DOS, time.exe name is
already occupied by an unrelated system utility; therefore, I called my
program chronos.
I tried to make the program mimic time output found on Linux.
Codes
The source code, build and run instructions are here: https://github.com/grigory-rechistov/chronos/. I tested with MS VS 21015 and 2010, x64 and x86 builds.
Related discussion page: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36011572/how-to-obtain-handles-for-all-children-process-of-current-process-in-windows. In short: use Job Objects WinAPI to contain a process and its children, and query the job object for resources usage.
Notes
There is no stock getopt() implementation for Windows, and I did not
want to depend on either (L)GPL-licensed or non-Unicode implementation I
found on the Net. Therefore I resorted to writing minimal options
parsing myself. I must admit, the resulting code in ParseAgv() is lame.
It looks like there is a security problem in CreateProcess() usage in
the first revision of the program: passing the program name in the same
line with its arguments may go wrong if the name contains spaces. The
first parameter to CreateProcess() should not be NULL. I am about to
fix it soon. Update: fixed, though not completely. Calling for regular
EXEs is OK now, but BAT files use NULL as the first argument — to pass
down the burden of constructing proper command line to the system.