NAME

       time - time functions for gawk

SYNOPSIS

       @load "time"

       time = gettimeofday()
       ret = sleep(amount)
       timeval = strptime(string, format)

DESCRIPTION

       The time extension adds three functions named gettimeofday() sleep(), and strptime(), as follows.

       gettimeofday()
              This  function  returns the number of seconds since the Epoch as a floating-point value. It should
              have subsecond precision.  It returns -1 upon error and sets ERRNO to indicate the problem.

       sleep(seconds)
              This function attempts to sleep for the given amount of seconds, which may  include  a  fractional
              portion.   If  seconds  is  negative,  or  the attempt to sleep fails, then it returns -1 and sets
              ERRNO.  Otherwise, the function should return 0 after sleeping for the indicated amount of time.

       strptime()
              This function takes two arguments, a string representing a date and  time,  and  a  format  string
              describing  the  data  in  the  string. It calls the C library strptime(3) function with the given
              values.  If the parsing succeeds, the results are passed to the C library mktime(3) function,  and
              its  result  is  returned,  expressing  the  time  in seconds since the epoch in the current local
              timezone, regardless of any timezone specified in the string arguments.   (This  is  the  same  as
              gawk's  built-in  systime()  function.)   Otherwise  it returns -1 upon error. In the latter case,
              ERRNO indicates the problem.

BUGS

       The underlying strptime(3) C library routine apparently ignores any time  zone  indication  in  the  date
       string,  producing  values  relative  to  the current time zone.  It might be better to have this routine
       return a string similar to what gawk's mktime() function expects, but we ran out of energy.

EXAMPLE

       @load "time"
       ...
       printf "It is now %g seconds since the Epoch\n", gettimeofday()
       ...
       printf "Pausing for a while... " ; sleep(2.5) ; print "done"
       ...
       format = "%b %d %H:%M:%S %Z %Y"
       now = systime()
       print now, "<" (result = strftime(format, now)) ">",
       then = strptime(result, format)
       print strftime(format, then)

SEE ALSO

       GAWK: Effective AWK Programming,  filefuncs(3am),  fnmatch(3am),  fork(3am),  inplace(3am),  ordchr(3am),
       readdir(3am), readfile(3am), revoutput(3am), rwarray(3am).

       gettimeofday(2), nanosleep(2), select(2), and strptime(3).

AUTHOR

       Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS

       Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2018, 2022, 2023, 2024, Free Software Foundation, Inc.
       Copyright © 2019, Arnold David Robbins.

       Permission  is  granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual page provided the copyright
       notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual page under  the  conditions
       for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
       permission notice identical to this one.

       Permission  is  granted  to  copy  and distribute translations of this manual page into another language,
       under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated  in  a
       translation approved by the Foundation.

Free Software Foundation                           Nov 13 2024                                         TIME(3am)