Unix "time" command with pipeline prints no time-report

Question

Of the two C-shell aliases below, only the first prints the time command's report of elapsed time. How can I get the alias with the pipeline to also print the time report?

alias make1 'time make'

alias make2 'time make |& tee make.log'

Answer 1

The time command built-in to the C shell (csh or tcsh) doesn't work with pipelines. To avoid this limitation, use the standalone time command instead, which is usually found at /usr/bin/time (if it isn't, try whereis time to locate it).

Change time in your command-line to /usr/bin/time (or /usr/bin/time -p) or whatever the path to the time program is, and it should work.

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Why it didn't work:

The C shell (like some other shells) has a built-in time command (see the builtin manual page), which is used in preference to the non-builtin (standalone) time program:

% which time
time: shell built-in command.
% 

and the man page for csh (actually tcsh on my system) states:

time [command]
   Executes command (which must be a simple command, not an alias,
   a pipeline, a command list or a parenthesized command list) ...

The /usr/bin/time command doesn't have this limitation, and neither do the inbuilt time commands of most other shells, for example bash or zsh.

Answer 2

Did you mean to use a pipe there? What you're essentially doing is piping the result of the second time command into tee. That's why your result is not being printed out - it's actually probably being written into make.log.