How to get current timestamp in milliseconds since 1970 just the way Java gets

Question

In Java, we can use System.currentTimeMillis() to get the current timestamp in Milliseconds since epoch time which is -

the difference, m

Answer 1

If using gettimeofday you have to cast to long long otherwise you will get overflows and thus not the real number of milliseconds since the epoch: long int msint = tp.tv_sec * 1000 + tp.tv_usec / 1000; will give you a number like 767990892 which is round 8 days after the epoch ;-).

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    struct timeval tp;
    gettimeofday(&tp, NULL);
    long long mslong = (long long) tp.tv_sec * 1000L + tp.tv_usec / 1000; //get current timestamp in milliseconds
    std::cout << mslong << std::endl;
}