home   contributing   bugs   download   online pages  

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | CONFORMING TO | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHONThe Linux Programming Interface


FTIME(3)                      Linux Programmer's Manual                      FTIME(3)

NAME         top

       ftime - return date and time

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <sys/timeb.h>

       int ftime(struct timeb *tp);

DESCRIPTION         top

       This function returns the current time as seconds and milliseconds since the
       Epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 (UTC).  The time is returned in tp, which is
       declared as follows:

           struct timeb {
               time_t         time;
               unsigned short millitm;
               short          timezone;
               short          dstflag;
           };

       Here time is the number of seconds since the Epoch, and millitm is the number
       of milliseconds since time seconds since the Epoch.  The timezone field is the
       local timezone measured in minutes of time west of Greenwich (with a negative
       value indicating minutes east of Greenwich).  The dstflag field is a flag
       that, if nonzero, indicates that Daylight Saving time applies locally during
       the appropriate part of the year.

       POSIX.1-2001 says that the contents of the timezone and dstflag fields are
       unspecified; avoid relying on them.

RETURN VALUE         top

       This function always returns 0.  (POSIX.1-2001 specifies, and some systems
       document, a -1 error return.)

CONFORMING TO         top

       4.2BSD, POSIX.1-2001.  POSIX.1-2008 removes the specification of ftime().

       This function is obsolete.  Don't use it.  If the time in seconds suffices,
       time(2) can be used; gettimeofday(2) gives microseconds; clock_gettime(2)
       gives nanoseconds but is not as widely available.

BUGS         top

       Under libc4 and libc5 the millitm field is meaningful.  But early glibc2 is
       buggy and returns 0 there; glibc 2.1.1 is correct again.

SEE ALSO         top

       gettimeofday(2), time(2)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project.  A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
       at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU                                   2010-02-25                             FTIME(3)

HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface

customisable
counter