note ehdonhon <P>I guess it depends on what you mean by "External". The [cpan://Benchmark] module is part of the core Perl distro, and does exactly what you want. (from the pod):</P> <CODE> use Benchmark; $t0 = new Benchmark; # ... your code here ... $t1 = new Benchmark; $td = timediff($t1, $t0); print "the code took:",timestr($td),"\n"; </CODE> 307729 307729