difftime

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. The two times are specified in calendar time, which represents the time elapsed since the Epoch (00:00:00 on January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time (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.

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.

SEE ALSO

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