Question

In shell scripting, when ever I want the local time I do something like

date +%s

from the command line and it returns me the current date and time in this format “1343221713”

I am wondering whether there is a way to achieve the same result in C

Answer 1

More flexible than time(3) is gettimeofday(3) as declared in sys/time.h

#include <sys/time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
        struct timeval tv = {0};
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        printf("seconds since epoch %ld, microseconds %ld\n", tv.tv_sec, tv.tv_usec);
        return 0;
}