Reading System clock through C

dgarrad

This may be an easy question to answer,but I've spent the last week asking various people and trying to find an answer on the net with no luck.What I want to do is be able to read the time and date from the system clock using a C program,but I have no idea if there's a function to do this,and if so how do I use it?Any help would be appreciated.

Hobbes

http://www-ccs.ucsd.edu/c/time.html

Dizz

Actually a Q...
What's the granularity of that function?
Is it 20ms? ie based on the system clock. Is there a way to get finer granularity with out changing hardware arch.?

Dizz

Silent Bob

Originally posted by Dizz
Actually a Q...
What's the granularity of that function?
Is it 20ms? ie based on the system clock. Is there a way to get finer granularity with out changing hardware arch.?

Dizz

time.h gives you accuracy to the second.

If you don't mind losing cross-platformness you can use gettimeofday()

It's a *nix system call that gives you values down to the microsecond. I wouldn't know the exact win32 equivalent...

dazberry

Originally posted by Silent Bob

It's a *nix system call that gives you values down to the microsecond. I wouldn't know the exact win32 equivalent...

DWORD GetTickCount(VOID);

Silent Bob

MSDN says that GetTickCount() returns the number of milliseconds since the system was started, not the time. Although a quick search says that GetSystemTime gives you date/time accurate to milliseconds.

Hobbes

failing that you could just get the tick count from the start of your program and link to the time, then use the next tick count to get the difference in time better.

But the functions should already be there to do this.

dazberry

Originally posted by Silent Bob
MSDN says that GetTickCount() returns the number of milliseconds since the system was started, not the time. Although a quick search says that GetSystemTime gives you date/time accurate to milliseconds.

Yeap, sorry should have read the whole thread.

D.