Description

Gets the system date and time in seconds, as an integer. Useful for determining execution time of a script or other length operations.

Passing the system time to formatTime provides a textual representation of the time, useful for time stamps or other places where date and time are needed.

Functional area

System

Command syntax

Syntax

getSystemTime

Arguments

None

Flags

None

Return value

integer

Return the time as seconds elapsed since midnight, January 1, 1970

Examples

// Calculate how long it takes to go through a 1,000,000
// iteration loop. It's about 3 seconds on a 3ghz machine.
int $i, $startTime, $endTime;
string $timeStr;
 
// Get the start time
$startTime = `getSystemTime`;
$timeStr = `formatTime $startTime`;
print $timeStr;
 
// Do an empty, lengthy loop
while( $i < 1000000 )
     {
       $i += 1;
     } 
// Get the end time
$endTime = `getSystemTime`;
$timeStr = `formatTime $endTime`;
print $timeStr;
 
// Now get the execution time
print int( $endTime - $startTime );