I am trying to get the time it takes to run a command, with the output in a specific format:

time -f "%E" ls -l

This is similar to the example in the man page (and on the online man page). However when I run this command I get:

-f: command not found

It appears as though the time command is not reading the -f as an argument, rather as the command I am trying to run.

How can I get the execution time for a command in a specific format?