title: Am I correct in assuming that "echo" and "cat" are too fast for the "time" command to time?
body: <p>I was converting a few shell subprocesses to JavaScript in a Node.js project, and out of curiosity I wanted to see the difference between <code>cat</code> and <code>echo</code> with the <code>time</code> command (nothing to do with the project, just wanted to see how fast they were).</p>
  <pre class="lang-bash prettyprint-override"><code>time echo &quot;Hello World!&quot;
  </code></pre>
  <p>Which is when I got the following output:</p>
  <pre class="lang-bash prettyprint-override"><code>Hello World!
  
  real    0m0.000s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.000s
  </code></pre>
  <p>Not quite zero but I got a similar output from the <code>cat</code> command:</p>
  <pre class="lang-bash prettyprint-override"><code>time cat compile.js
  </code></pre>
  <pre class="lang-bash prettyprint-override"><code>import Build from &quot;./src/build.js&quot;;
  Build.main();
  
  real    0m0.003s
  user    0m0.003s
  sys     0m0.000s
  </code></pre>
  <p>Some or all of the <code>time</code> fields say <code>0m0.000s</code>. Does this mean it's processing so fast that it can't be measured with <code>time</code>? If not, what's happening?</p>