Question

Depending on the amount of input data, I have a program that runs in seconds or in days. At the end of my program, I want to print the elapsed “clock wall” time: in seconds if it is less then one minute, in min and sec if it is less than one hour, in hour-min-sec if it is less than one day, and in day-hour-min-sec otherwise. Here is the code I am using:

#include <cstdio>
#include <ctime>
#include <unistd.h> // for sleep

int main (int argc, char ** argv)
{
  time_t startRawTime, endRawTime;

  time (&startRawTime);
  printf ("%s", ctime (&startRawTime));

  sleep (3); // any preprocessing of input data

  time (&endRawTime);
  printf ("%s", ctime (&endRawTime));

  printf ("%.0fs\n", difftime (endRawTime, startRawTime));

  time_t elapsed = static_cast<time_t>(difftime (endRawTime, startRawTime));
  struct tm * ptm = gmtime (&elapsed);
  printf ("%id %ih %im %is\n", ptm->tm_mday, ptm->tm_hour, ptm->tm_min, ptm->tm_sec);

  return 0;
}

Here is what it prints:

Mon Apr  9 14:43:16 2012
Mon Apr  9 14:43:19 2012
3s
1d 0h 0m 3s

Of course the last line is wrong (it should be “0d”). It seems it can be solved easily by printing ptm->tm_mday - 1. However, ptm->tm_mday will also be “1” when there really was one day elapsed between the two dates. And so in that case, I don’t want to make it appear as “0d”.

So is there a way to handle this properly? Or should I get the result of difftime as a double (that is, as a number of seconds) and then calculate myself the number of sec/min/hours/days?

Remark: my code is used only on Linux, compiled with gcc -lstdc++.

Answer 1

A time_t value represents a particular moment in time. The result of difftime is the interval, in seconds, between two moments. That’s a very different thing.

In your code, difftime() returns 3.0, since there are 3 seconds between the two specified times. Converting that to time_t gives you a moment 3 seconds after the epoch; on most systems, that’s going to be 3 seconds past midnight GMT on January 1, 1970. The tm_mday value is 1 because that was the first day of the month.

You might be able to make this work by subtracting 1 from the tm_mday value, since tm_mday is 1-based rather than 0-based. But you’ll still get meaningless results for longer intervals. For example, an interval of 31.5 days will give you noon on February 1, because January has 31 days; that’s not relevant to the information you’re trying to get.

Just treat the result of difftime() as a double (because that’s what it is) and compute the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds by simple arithmetic.

(With some loss of portability, you can just subract the time_t values directly rather than using difftime(). That will make some of the arithmetic a little easier, but it will break on systems where a time_t value is something other than an integer count of seconds since some epoch. difftime() exists for a reason.)

Of course the last line is wrong (it should be “0d”). It seems it can
be solved easily by printing “ptm->tm_mday – 1”. However, ptm->tm_mday
will also be “1” when there really was one day elapsed between the two
dates. And so in that case, I don’t want to make it appear as “0d”.

That’s not correct; if the time interval is just over 1 day, ptm->tm_mday will be 2. You can verify this with a small modification to your code:

time (&endRawTime);
endRawTime += 86400; // add this line
printf ("%s", ctime (&endRawTime));

When I make this change, I get this output:

Mon Apr  9 13:56:49 2012
Tue Apr 10 13:56:52 2012
86403s
2d 0h 0m 3s

which could be corrected by subtracting 1 from ptm->tm_mday. But again, that’s not the right approach.