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@(#)gettimeofday.2 8.2 (Berkeley) 5/26/95
.Dd October 16, 2022 .Dt GETTIMEOFDAY 2 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm gettimeofday , .Nm settimeofday .Nd get/set date and time .Sh LIBRARY .Lb libc .Sh SYNOPSIS n sys/time.h .Ft int .Fn gettimeofday "struct timeval * restrict tp" "void * restrict tzp" .Ft int .Fn settimeofday "const struct timeval * restrict tp" "const void * restrict tzp" .Sh DESCRIPTION f -symbolic Note: time zone information is no longer provided by this interface. See .Xr localtime 3 for information on how to retrieve it. .Ef
p The system's notion of the current UTC time is obtained with the .Fn gettimeofday call, and set with the .Fn settimeofday call. The time is expressed in seconds and microseconds since midnight (0 hour), January 1, 1970. The resolution of the system clock is hardware dependent, and the time may be updated continuously or in .Dq ticks .
p If .Fa tp is NULL, the time will not be returned or set. Despite being declared .Fa void * , the objects pointed to by .Fa tzp shall be of type .Fa struct timezone .
p The structures pointed to by .Fa tp and .Fa tzp are defined in n sys/time.h . The first one is described in .Xr timeval 3 and the latter legacy structure is defined as: d -literal -offset indent struct timezone { int tz_minuteswest; /* of Greenwich */ int tz_dsttime; /* type of dst correction to apply */ }; .Ed
p The .Fa timezone structure is provided only for source compatibility. It is ignored by .Fn settimeofday , and .Fn gettimeofday will always return zeroes.
p
The
.Fn settimeofday
system call is available only for the super-user.
If the calling user is not the super-user, the system call will fail, and the
.Fn settimeofday
function in the standard C library will try to use the
.Xr clockctl 4
device if present, thus making it possible for non privileged users to
set the system time.
If
.Xr clockctl 4
is not present or not accessible, then
.Fn settimeofday
returns
.Er EPERM .
XXX uncomment when/if this is put into place!
If the system is running in secure mode (see
.Xr init 8 ),
the time may only be advanced.
This limitation is imposed to prevent a malicious super user
from setting arbitrary time stamps on files.
The system time can still be adjusted backwards using the
.Xr adjtime 2
system call even when the system is secure.
.Sh RETURN VALUES
A return value 0 indicates that the call succeeded.
A return value -1 indicates an error occurred, and in this
case an error code is stored into the global variable
.Va errno .
.Sh ERRORS
The following error codes may be set in
.Va errno :
l -tag -width Er t Bq Er EFAULT An argument address referenced invalid memory.
t Bq Er EINVAL .Fn settimeofday :
.Ar tp.tv_sec
is outside the range [0..2^36] or
.Ar tp.tv_usec
is outside the range [0..999,999].
t Bq Er EPERM A user other than the super user attempted to set the time, or the specified
time was less than the current time, which was not permitted at the current
security level.
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr date 1 ,
.Xr adjtime 2 ,
.Xr ctime 3 ,
.Xr localtime 3 ,
.Xr clockctl 4 ,
.Xr timed 8
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Fn gettimeofday
function call appeared in
x 4.2 . The
.Fa tzp
argument was deprecated in
x 4.4 (and many other systems).
Indexes created Mon Sep 22 05:09:51 GMT 2025