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Manual page for gettimeofday(3B)

gettimeofday, settimeofday - get or set the date and time

SYNOPSIS

/usr/ucb/cc [ flag ... ] file ...

#include <sys/time.h>

int gettimeofday( tp, tzp)
struct timeval *tzp;
struct timezone *tzp;

int settimeofday( tp, tzp)
struct timeval *tzp;
struct timezone *tzp;

DESCRIPTION

The system's notion of the current Greenwich time is obtained with the gettimeofday() call, and set with the settimeofday() call. The current time is expressed in elapsed seconds and microseconds since 00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (zero hour). The resolution of the system clock is hardware dependent; the time may be updated continuously, or in clock ticks.

tp points to a timeval structure, which includes the following members:

long	tv_sec;	/* seconds since Jan. 1, 1970 */
long	tv_usec;	/* and microseconds */

If tp is a NULL pointer, the current time information is not returned or set.

tzp is an obsolete pointer formerly used to get and set timezone information. tzp is now ignored. Timezone information is now handled using the TZ environment variable; see TIMEZONE.4

Only the privileged user may set the time of day.

RETURN VALUES

A -1 return value indicates an error occurred; in this case an error code is stored in the global variable errno.

ERRORS

The following error codes may be set in errno:

EINVAL: tp specifies an invalid time.
EPERM: A user other than the privileged user attempted to set the time.

NOTES

Use of these interfaces should be restricted to only applications written on BSD platforms. Use of these interfaces with any of the system libraries or in multi-thread applications is unsupported.

tzp is ignored in SunOS 5.X releases.

tv_usec is always 0.