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This is an excerpt from the latest version perlfaq8.pod, which
comes with the standard Perl distribution. These postings aim to
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8.17: How can I measure time under a second?

(contributed by brian d foy)

The "Time::HiRes" module (part of the standard distribution as of Perl
5.8) measures time with the "gettimeofday()" system call, which returns
the time in microseconds since the epoch. If you can't install
"Time::HiRes" for older Perls and you are on a Unixish system, you may
be able to call gettimeofday(2) directly. See "syscall" in perlfunc.



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