How can I show how much time is left for a script to complete?

I know there's a function call 'waitbar'; however, I want to show whoever is running my script how much time is left before it will be finished. It is a long script that consists of many different functions and loops.

Thanks, Mirage

[David Barry]

Are you looking to display a time in seconds or percentage complete? This problem is highly dependent on your code so it's tricky to give a precise answer. Typically you would put the waitbar inside the loop, for example:

h = waitbar(0,'Please wait...');
steps = 1000;
for step = 1:steps
    % computations take place here
    waitbar(step / steps)
end
close(h)

If you wanted to display a time then you would have to time the first iteration of the loop using tic toc and then update accordingly. Of course this all depends on your code. Could you include an example of your code?

[Mirage]

Hi Dave,

The script is pretty long, roughly 900 lines and it's not contained in a for loop so it would be tough to tic toc the first iteration and judge it based on that.

[Paulo Abelha]

Hi Dave,

I've coded a function that might help you:

https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/59187-displayestimatedtimeofloop--tot-toc--curr-ix--tot-iter--

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

Clever use of tic and toc may provide an estimate of how much time the script has been running, and how much time is left.

tic
steps = 10;
for step = 1:steps

      % [calculations here]

      if step==1 
          toc1=toc; 
      end
      time_elapsed = toc;
      estimated_time_remaining = (steps-step)*toc1;

      disp([num2str(time_elapsed),' seconds down, ',num2str(estimated_time_remaining),' seconds to go!'])
  end

Answer 2

[John Petersen]

One thing you can do is determine where the bulk of the computation time resides. Hopefully this is in a loop. You could then time each loop and then display the time left based on how many iterations remain. Otherwise, it's going to vary too much from computer to computer to be very useful.