gettimeofday() format

[tetelee]

Hi there,

I am having problem understanding the result of gettimeofday() call. In my understanding, it returns a struct of timeval, which has the definition

struct timeval {
    time_t      tv_sec;     /* seconds */
    suseconds_t tv_usec;    /* microseconds */
};

The tv_sec part of the return value represents the seconds part since the Epoch, and tv_usec represents the microsecond part, meaning that these two parts are sort of irrelevant, right? However, if I do a call like this:

struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday(&tv);
printf("%u.%u \n",&tv.tv_sec,&tv.tv_usec);

which, by the way, is from one example from online. The result is beyond my understanding that the tv_usec part is always larger than the tv_sec part by 4. For example, one output would be: 3216945432.3216945436 But like I said, should these two parts be irrelevant? Or is there any misunderstanding? Thanks for any help!

[Rubberman]

Remove the & from &tv.tv_sec and &tv.tv_usec in the printf() call. In order to convert the tv.tv_sec to a sensible date+time value you would use one of the related functions, such as ctime(). See you system man pages for more details.

[tetelee]

Remove the & from &tv.tv_sec and &tv.tv_usec in the printf() call. In order to convert the tv.tv_sec to a sensible date+time value you would use one of the related functions, such as ctime(). See you system man pages for more details.

Thanks Rubber,

Now it works. It was such a stupid problem.