getting time string

[Matt Churchyard]

I have pieced together some functions to get the current time as a string.
This is used in a logging function and works a few times, but after being
called
more than about 6 times, it causes a core dump.
Is there a better way of getting the time as a string?

my code
--------------------------------------------
time_t *etime; // pointer to unix time
char *stime; // time string

time(etime); // get current unix time
stime = ctime(etime); // convert to string
stime[24] = 0; // remove \n
---------------------------------------------

--

Thanks,
Matt Churchyard

[Jens.Toerring@physik.fu-berlin.de]

Matt Churchyard <matt@userve.net> wrote:

> I have pieced together some functions to get the current time as a string.
> This is used in a logging function and works a few times, but after being
> called
> more than about 6 times, it causes a core dump.
> Is there a better way of getting the time as a string?

> my code
> --------------------------------------------
> time_t *etime; // pointer to unix time
> char *stime; // time string

> time(etime); // get current unix time

From the man page of time(2):

time returns the time since the Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, Jan-
uary 1, 1970), measured in seconds.

If t is non-NULL, the return value is also stored in the
memory pointed to by t.

In your case etime is an unitialized pointer, which is probably *not*
NULL, but pointing at some random place in memory. Thus time() writes
over this memory and if you're lucky, you get a crash because you
destroyed someting you needed immediately. Either change your code so
that you have

time_t etime;
time( &etime );

or

time_t etime;
etime = time( NULL );
Regards, Jens
--
_ _____ _____
| ||_ _||_ _| [email]Jens.Toerring@physik.fu-berlin.de[/email]
_ | | | | | |
| |_| | | | | | [url]http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~toerring[/url]
\___/ens|_|homs|_|oerring