Name

difftime — calculate time difference

Synopsis

#include <time.h>
double difftime( time_t time1,
  time_t time0);
 

DESCRIPTION

The difftime() function returns the number of seconds elapsed between time time1 and time time0, represented as a double. Each of the times is specified in calendar time, which means its value is a measurement (in seconds) relative to the Epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 (UTC).

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89, C99.

NOTES

On a POSIX system, time_t is an arithmetic type, and one could just define

#define difftime(t1,t0) (double)(t1 − t0)

when the possible overflow in the subtraction is not a concern. On other systems, the data type time_t might use some other encoding where subtraction doesn't work directly.

SEE ALSO

date(1), gettimeofday(2), time(2), ctime(3), gmtime(3), localtime(3)

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 3.24 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.


  Copyright 1993 David Metcalfe (davidprism.demon.co.uk)

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References consulted:
    Linux libc source code
    Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
    386BSD man pages
Modified Sat Jul 24 19:48:17 1993 by Rik Faith (faithcs.unc.edu)