time(3)

NAME

time - get time of day

LIBRARY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

#include <time.h>
time_t
time(time_t *tloc);

DESCRIPTION

The time() function returns the value of time in seconds

since 0 hours, 0
minutes, 0 seconds, January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal

Time. If an
error occurs, time() returns the value (time_t)-1.

The return value is also stored in *tloc, provided that tloc

is non-null.

ERRORS

The time() function may fail for any of the reasons de

scribed in
gettimeofday(2).

SEE ALSO

gettimeofday(2), ctime(3)

STANDARDS

The time function conforms to .

HISTORY

A time() function appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS

Neither ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (``ISO C99'') nor requires time()

to set errno
on failure; thus, it is impossible for an application to

distinguish the
valid time value -1 (representing the last UTC second of

1969) from the
error return value.

Systems conforming to earlier versions of the C and POSIX

standards
(including older versions of FreeBSD) did not set *tloc in

the error
case.

BSD July 18, 2003

BSD