My favorite tool for this is Benchmark::Timer.

use Benchmark::Timer;

my $T = new Benchmark::Timer;

$T->start( 'Outer' );

for( 1 .. 1000 ) { 

    $T->start( 'Inner' ); 

    # Request a 50 millisec delay to simulate command
    select undef, undef, undef, 0.05; 

    $T->stop( 'Inner' ) 
}; 
$T->stop( 'Outer' );

$T->report;

1 trial of Outer (199.094s total)

1000 trials of Inner (62.500s total), 62.500ms/trial
[download]

This is also relatively easy to accomplish without moudules (although modules are easier since the hard stuff is already done). But in the interest of learning more about perl.....

time() returns the seconds from the epoch (Jan 1, 1970 on most systems). So $begining_time - $end_time will give you the number of seconds it took your script to run. From there, getting the hours, minutes, seconds is really just a matter of doing some math.

Here is a quick one:

$total_time = $end_time - $begining_time;
# get the total minutes
$minutes = ($total_time / 60);
# get the reminader for seconds
$seconds = ($total_time % 60);
# get the total hours
$hours = ($minutes / 60);
# and re-adjust minutes to be just the minutes
$minutes = ($minutes % 60);
# I use printf here to make sure we have integers
printf "%d hours, %d minutes, %d seconds", $hours, $minutes, $seconds;
[download]

how would I turn that into x amount of hours, x amount of minutes, and x amount of seconds

Your approach is quite sound for any process that is going to take many seconds to complete. The Benchmark module is good for measuring different snippets of code that take milliseconds to run.

If your question is simply how to convert a large number of seconds into seconds, minutes, hours and beyond, you just have to take the modulo, and then divide by, the length of the interval you're interested in. The following code demonstrates the idea:

  my $seconds = $duration % 60;
  $duration /= 60;
  my $minutes = $duration % 60;
  $duration /= 60;
  my $hours = $duration % 24;
  my $days = $duration;
[download]

That's only a rough sketch. You also have to deal with the rounding of the different division operations. It's much easier to get a module like Time::Duration to do it. You might also want to look at an old node of mine: Formatting elapsed time.

There's always time(1) if you're using a reasonable operating system:

2) eyrie:~/perl/poe% time sleep 1
sleep 1  0.00s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 1.041 total

-- Rocco Caputo - rcaputo@pobox.com - poe.perl.org