ctime, ctime_s

The resulting string has the following format:

Www Mmm dd hh:mm:ss yyyy\n

• Www - the day of the week (one of Mon , Tue , Wed , Thu , Fri , Sat , Sun ).
• Mmm - the month (one of Jan , Feb , Mar , Apr , May , Jun , Jul , Aug , Sep , Oct , Nov , Dec ).
• dd - the day of the month
• hh - hours
• mm - minutes
• ss - seconds
• yyyy - years

The function does not support localization.

Parameters

Return value

Notes

ctime returns a pointer to static data and is not thread-safe. In addition, it modifies the static tm object which may be shared with gmtime and localtime . POSIX marks this function obsolete and recommends strftime instead. The C standard also recommends strftime instead of ctime and ctime_s because strftime is more flexible and locale-sensitive.

The behavior of ctime is undefined for the values of time_t that result in the string longer than 25 characters (e.g. year 10000).

Example

#define __STDC_WANT_LIB_EXT1__ 1
#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void)
{
    time_t result = time(NULL);
    printf("%s", ctime(&result));
 
#ifdef __STDC_LIB_EXT1__
    char str[26];
    ctime_s(str,sizeof str,&result);
    printf("%s", str);
#endif
}

Tue May 26 21:51:03 2015
Tue May 26 21:51:03 2015

References

See also