Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!virtech!cpcahil
From: cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to generate Unix time from dates?
Message-ID: <1990Oct26.132604.16236@virtech.uucp>
Date: 26 Oct 90 13:26:04 GMT
References: <9X5%Q7*@ads.com>
Reply-To: cpcahil@virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill)
Organization: Virtual Technologies Inc., Sterling VA
Lines: 16

In article <9X5%Q7*@ads.com> jtn@ADS.COM (John T. Nelson) writes:
>For a project I'm working on I'd like to generate an unsigned long
>which contains the time of day on Unix systems.  This amounts to usec
>in the Unix time.h time_val struct I think.

The value returned by time(2) is the number of seconds (not microsecs) that
have past since 12 Midnight December 31, 1969 GMT.  There is no way to use
this value to represent date/times prior to that date.

You will have to come up with a different mechanism to represent these
dates. 

-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
uunet!virtech!cpcahil                           46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160
                                                Sterling, VA 22170