Windows technique to print timestamps before & after from the command line

On Unix, a quick way to output timestamps is:

$ date ; slowcommand ; date
Tue Sep  2 12:12:18 MDT 2014
Tue Sep  2 12:12:34 MDT 2014
$ 

But if you try a similar approach at the Windows command prompt, there's a few problems.

• The command TIME /T outputs the time, but only in HH:MM format.
   
• The command prompt's builtin magic variable %TIME% outputs HH:MM:SS.ss, but if you try it, the results are unexpected:

  C:\>echo %TIME% && SLOWCOMMAND && echo %TIME%
  13:42:05.10
  13:42:05.10
  
  C:\>

  The timestamps come out the same, because the command prompt does all variable substitution in a line at once, before executing the first command.
  
  In batch files, this can be mitigated with the setting ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION and referring to variables !LIKETHIS! instead of %LIKETHIS%. But that won't work at the command prompt.

The solution I used was to run the command explicitly afterwards with CMD /C , using the ^ to escape out the % character:

C:\>echo %TIME% && SLOWCOMMAND && cmd /c echo %TIME^%
13:51:27.58
13:51:46.66

C:\>

Other solutions welcome.

Syndicated 2014-09-02 20:18:46 from jon's blog