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I recently copied a large set of files (about 6 GB) into my Pen Drive. Is there any way to determine the time taken to complete copying from any of log files. I am using Mac OS Mountain Lion Operating System.

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Not from a log file, no. You can, however, use the terminal's time and cp to do this. Here's how:

  1. Open terminal
  2. Enter the following:
    time cp -R ~/Desktop/nameoffoldertocopy /Volumes/nameofpendrive/
  3. Enjoy.

This will start a timer, copy the entire folder you list over to your pen drive and output how long the whole process took.

Here is a real world example using a folder on my desktop named "partslist" and an external USB drive named "Drive Two":

time cp -R ~/Desktop/partslist/ /Volumes/Drive\ Two/

And from the output in Terminal I can see it took just over half a second (you want the value for "real"):

real    0m0.670s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.013s
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  • I am not tested using your command. Anyway for clarifying the question - Can I know the time taken for a finished Job? I mean I already copied a file into Pendrive One Hour ago. Can I know the time taken for that log? Up to my understanding, it is NO. But I would I would like to to know if there is some method exist.
    – rakeshNS
    Feb 8, 2013 at 7:47
  • no, OSX doesn't log each and every file I/O operation...as each log would be a file I/O and, well you get the problem!
    – cjb110
    Feb 8, 2013 at 8:01
  • cjb110 is correct. You cannot tell if you did not time it. There is no log file for this.
    – gaoshan88
    Feb 8, 2013 at 16:46

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