Question

I need to get the following code working platform independent:

 timeval tv;
 tv.tv_sec = std::numeric_limits<time_t>::max();

This code works fine under all kinds of Linux OS and Mac OS X.

Unfortunately under windows this would return -1, for tv.tv_sec.

I thought then about redefining time_t like this:

 typedef int time_t;

This did not work either as the comiler complains now about:

error C2371: 'time_t' : redefinition; different basic types

How can I get the code this code running on plattform independent?

Answer 1

tv.tv_sec = std::numeric_limits<decltype(tv.tv_sec)>::max();

Alternative without decltype

template<typename T> 
void set_max(T& val){val = std::numeric_limits<T>::max();}

set_max(tv.tv_sec);