How to get the current time in milliseconds from C in Linux?

Question

How do I get the current time on Linux in milliseconds?

Answer 1

Following is the util function to get current timestamp in milliseconds:

#include 

long long current_timestamp() {
    struct timeval te; 
    gettimeofday(&te, NULL); // get current time
    long long milliseconds = te.tv_sec*1000LL + te.tv_usec/1000; // calculate milliseconds
    // printf("milliseconds: %lld\n", milliseconds);
    return milliseconds;
}

About timezone:

gettimeofday() support to specify timezone, I use NULL, which ignore the timezone, but you can specify a timezone, if need.

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@Update - timezone

Since the long representation of time is not relevant to or effected by timezone itself, so setting tz param of gettimeofday() is not necessary, since it won't make any difference.

And, according to man page of gettimeofday(), the use of the timezone structure is obsolete, thus the tz argument should normally be specified as NULL, for details please check the man page.