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VMS Help CRTL, ctime, Description *Conan The Librarian |
The ctime and ctime_r functions convert the time pointed to by
bintim into a 26-character string, and return a pointer to the
string.
The difference between the ctime_r and ctime functions is that
the former puts its result into a user-specified buffer. The
latter puts its result into thread-specific static memory
allocated by the Compaq C RTL, which can be overwritten by
subsequent calls to ctime or asctime; you must make a copy if
you want to save it.
On success, ctime returns a pointer to the string; ctime_r
returns its second argument. On failure, these functions return
the NULL pointer.
The type time_t is defined in the <time.h> header file as
follows:
typedef long int time_t
The ctime function behaves as if it called tzset.
NOTE
Generally speaking, UTC-based time functions can affect in-
memory time-zone information, which is processwide data.
However, if the system time zone remains the same during
the execution of the application (which is the common case)
and the cache of timezone files is enabled (which is the
default), then the _r variant of the time functions asctime_
r, ctime_r, gmtime_r, and localtime_r, is both thread-safe
and AST-reentrant.
If, however, the system time zone can change during the
execution of the application or the cache of timezone files
is not enabled, then both variants of the UTC-based time
functions belong to the third class of functions, which are
neither thread-safe nor AST-reentrant.
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