| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
TIME(2) Linux Programmer's Manual TIME(2)
time - get time in seconds
#include <time.h>
time_t time(time_t *t);
time() returns the time as the number of seconds since the Epoch, 1970-01-01
00:00:00 +0000 (UTC).
If t is non-NULL, the return value is also stored in the memory pointed to by
t.
On success, the value of time in seconds since the Epoch is returned. On
error, ((time_t) -1) is returned, and errno is set appropriately.
EFAULT t points outside your accessible address space.
SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001. POSIX does not specify any error
conditions.
POSIX.1 defines seconds since the Epoch as a value to be interpreted as the
number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch, according to a
formula for conversion from UTC equivalent to conversion on the naive basis
that leap seconds are ignored and all years divisible by 4 are leap years.
This value is not the same as the actual number of seconds between the time
and the Epoch, because of leap seconds and because clocks are not required to
be synchronized to a standard reference. The intention is that the
interpretation of seconds since the Epoch values be consistent; see POSIX.1
Annex B 2.2.2 for further rationale.
date(1), gettimeofday(2), ctime(3), ftime(3), time(7)
This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. A
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at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2010-02-25 TIME(2)
HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface