How to add durations in Powershell?

Question

I have two durations in my code. And I want to add them to get the total duration.

Many code examples add some durations to a date, but I have here two durations.

$startOfAnalysis = $(Get-Date)
#Analysis code here
$analysisDuration = $(Get-Date) - $startOfAnalysis
$totalAnalysisTime = "{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f ([datetime]  $analysisDuration.Ticks)
$totalAnalysisTime #Outputs similar to 00:16:21

$startOfExecution = $(Get-Date)
#Execution code here
$executionDuration = $(Get-Date) - $startOfExecution
$totalExecutionTime = "{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f ([datetime]$executionDuration.Ticks)
$totalExecutionTime #Outputs similar to 00:13:39

#($totalAnalysisTime+$totalExecutionTime) How to add the two to get 00:30:00?

How do I sum it up to make it to 30 minutes, i. e. 00:30:00?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 23 '19 at 10:01

I think there are two options.

First one: Convert your time back to seconds and then sum them up. Like that:

$Time1 = "01:56:40"
$textReformat1 = $Time1 -replace ",","."

$Time2 = "01:56:40" 
$textReformat2 = $Time2 -replace ",","."

$seconds = ([TimeSpan]::Parse($textReformat1)).TotalSeconds + ([TimeSpan]::Parse($textReformat2)).TotalSeconds


$TimeSpan = [timespan]::fromseconds($seconds)
("{0:HH\:mm\:ss}" -f [DateTime]$TimeSpan.Ticks)

And option two (the simple one):

Just calculate everything together before you convert them to a string. Something like that:

("{0:HH\:mm\:ss}" -f ([datetime]$analysisDuration.Ticks + $executionDuration.Ticks))

Credits to: Convert seconds to hh:mm:ss,fff format in PowerShell

For the example how to convert the timespan back to seconds

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '19 at 11:42

You can add two TimeSpan instances together directly, no need for conversion to DateTime and back:

$total = $executionDuration + $analysisDuration

Just like with a DateTime instance, you can now use the -f string format operator, but beware that you need to escape special characters:

'{0:hh\:mm\:ss}' -f $total

How to add durations in Powershell?

2 Answers2