illumos gate

From the Joyent bug report:

In Linux date(1) supports %N which outputs the nanoseconds of the current time:

joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312240.211019753
joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312241.420862398
joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312242.260851519
joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312242.990919297
joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312243.660914691
joshw@bh1-www0:~$ date +%s.%N
1347312244.300927523
joshw@bh1-www0:~$

which allows for nanosecond. In my use-case I just need something smaller than 1 second (ms would be great) that's available from bash. I have a shell script that does many things in one second and I just want to keep track internally of the time that each one of the steps takes. The steps themselves involve more than one command so using time(1) doesn't work so well for me.