adjtime

Name

adjtime -- correct the time to allow synchronization of the system clock

Synopsis

#include <time.h>

int adjtime(const struct timeval * delta, struct timeval * olddelta);

Description

adjtime() makes small adjustments to the system time as returned by gettimeofday()(2), advancing or retarding it by the time specified by the timeval delta. If delta is negative, the clock is slowed down by incrementing it more slowly than normal until the correction is complete. If delta is positive, a larger increment than normal is used. The skew used to perform the correction is generally a fraction of one percent. Thus, the time is always a monotonically increasing function. A time correction from an earlier call to adjtime() may not be finished when adjtime() is called again. If olddelta is non-NULL, the structure pointed to will contain, upon return, the number of microseconds still to be corrected from the earlier call.

adjtime() may be used by time servers that synchronize the clocks of computers in a local area network. Such time servers would slow down the clocks of some machines and speed up the clocks of others to bring them to the average network time.

Appropriate privilege is required to adjust the system time.

Return Value

On success, 0 is returned. On error, -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set appropriately.

Errors

EFAULT 

An argument points outside the process's allocated address space.

EPERM 

The process does not have appropriate privilege.