Question

I am porting a Python script to C#.

Currently I have encountered the code that uses

time.time()

As per Python documentation this function call returns a float of total count of seconds.

Return the time as a floating point number expressed in seconds since
the epoch, in UTC. Note that even though the time is always returned
as a floating point number, not all systems provide time with a better
precision than 1 second. While this function normally returns
non-decreasing values, it can return a lower value than a previous
call if the system clock has been set back between the two calls.

How can I get the same from CLR?

Answer 1

The start of “the Epoch” on Unix refers to January 1, 1970. That’s a fairly arbitrary date, set to be “early enough” that anyone querying the time since that date would get a positive number of seconds.

 TimeSpan t = (DateTime.UtcNow - 
               new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc));
 float seconds  = (float) t.TotalSeconds;
 Console.WriteLine (seconds);

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2004/03/20/93332.aspx