Returns the number of non-leap seconds since whatever time the system
considers to be the epoch (that's 00:00:00, January 1, 1904 for Mac OS,
and 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970 for most other systems).
Suitable for feeding to gmtime
and localtime
.
For measuring time in better granularity than one second,
you may use either the Time::HiRes module (from CPAN, and starting from
Perl 5.8 part of the standard distribution), or if you have
gettimeofday(2), you may be able to use the syscall
interface of Perl.
See perlfaq8 for details.