utime

Return the current wall-clock time as seconds and microseconds.

Synopsis

$utime()

Technical

Like time, this function reports seconds since the Unix epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. It also supplies the microseconds within that second. It takes no meaningful arguments; supplied text is ignored.

Each call reads CLOCK_REALTIME directly through get_time, rather than returning EPIC's cached event-loop time. The clock's nanosecond field is divided by 1000, discarding the remaining nanoseconds. The microsecond field is not padded with leading zeroes.

Practical

Use stime or strftime to format the seconds field for human reading. For arithmetic, interpret the two fields as seconds plus microseconds divided by one million. Do not simply join them with a decimal point unless the second field is padded to six digits.

The output has microsecond resolution, but actual clock precision and accuracy depend on the system. This is a wall clock: clock corrections can move it forwards or backwards, so it does not guarantee increasing values or steady elapsed-time measurements.

Returns

Two space-separated decimal integers: epoch seconds and microseconds within that second, normally from 0 through 999999. These are integer fields, not a floating-point result; floating-point display settings do not control their formatting. The implementation does not check clock_gettime failure, so it supplies no reliable error result if that call fails.

Examples

$time()  /* Might return 850381369. */
$utime() /* Might return 850381369 56367, representing 850381369.056367. */

Source

Registered and implemented as function_utime in source/functions.c. get_time reads CLOCK_REALTIME in source/ircaux.c.