iOS Manual Pages

This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

TIME(3)                  BSD Library Functions Manual                  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, without
     including leap seconds.  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 described in
     gettimeofday(2).

SEE ALSO
     gettimeofday(2), ctime(3)

STANDARDS
     The time function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

BUGS
     Neither ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (``ISO C99'') nor IEEE Std 1003.1-2001
     (``POSIX.1'') requires time() to set errno on failure; thus, it is impos-sible impossible
     sible for an application to distinguish the valid time value -1 (repre-senting (representing
     senting 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.

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

BSD                              July 18, 2003                             BSD