How do I get the unix timestamp in C as an int?

Question

I would like to get the current timestamp and print it out using fprintf.

Answer 1

Is just casting the value returned by time()

#include 
#include 

int main(void) {
    printf("Timestamp: %d\n",(int)time(NULL));
    return 0;
}

what you want?

$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -std=c99 tstamp.c && ./a.out
Timestamp: 1343846167

To get microseconds since the epoch, from C11 on, the portable way is to use

int timespec_get(struct timespec *ts, int base)

Unfortunately, C11 is not yet available everywhere, so as of now, the closest to portable is using one of the POSIX functions clock_gettime or gettimeofday (marked obsolete in POSIX.1-2008, which recommends clock_gettime).

The code for both functions is nearly identical:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main(void) {

    struct timespec tms;

    /* The C11 way */
    /* if (! timespec_get(&tms, TIME_UTC)) { */

    /* POSIX.1-2008 way */
    if (clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME,&tms)) {
        return -1;
    }
    /* seconds, multiplied with 1 million */
    int64_t micros = tms.tv_sec * 1000000;
    /* Add full microseconds */
    micros += tms.tv_nsec/1000;
    /* round up if necessary */
    if (tms.tv_nsec % 1000 >= 500) {
        ++micros;
    }
    printf("Microseconds: %"PRId64"\n",micros);
    return 0;
}