Get CPU time on OS X

Question

I need to be able to get the CPU time for the current process from inside some C code.

On Linux, I can use clock_gettime with CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID. On BSD I can use clock_gettime with CLOCK_VIRTUAL. On Windows, GetProcessTimes. What is the OS X alternative?

Answer 1

You have a couple of options:

• clock() (standard C)
• getrusage() (POSIX)

There's also a Mach API task_info() but it doesn't seem to offer any obvious benefit over the portable alternatives for querying CPU time.