How to get the current time and date C++ UTC time not local

Question

I would like to know how I can get the UTC time or any other timezone ( NOT just local time) in C++ Linux.

I would like to do something like: int Minutes = time.now(Minutes) to get and store the year, month, day, hour, minute and second at that exact time.
How I can do so?

I will need to repeat this process many time; I want to know the newest and best way to do so.

Answer 1

You are looking for the gmtime function in the time.h library, which give you UTC time. Here's an example:

#include <stdio.h>      /* printf */
#include <time.h>       /* time_t, struct tm, time, gmtime */

int main ()
{
  time_t rawtime;
  struct tm * ptm;
  // Get number of seconds since 00:00 UTC Jan, 1, 1970 and store in rawtime
  time ( &rawtime );
  // UTC struct tm
  ptm = gmtime ( &rawtime );
  // print current time in a formatted way
  printf ("UTC time: %2d:%02d\n", ptm->tm_hour, ptm->tm_min);

  return 0;
}

Look at these sources:

• https://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/gmtime/
• https://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/time_t/

Answer 2

You can use system command in c++ if you want linux oriented solution

eg

    #include <iostream>
    #include <sstream>        //for stringstream function to store date and time
    
    using namespace std;
    
    int main()
    {
        const char *date_now = "date -u";       //linux command to get UTC time is "date -u"
        stringstream s;
        s << system(date_now);        //to store output of system("date_now") to s;
        cout << s.str() << endl;        //to print the string in s
        
        return 0;
    }

Check out "date --help" for more date and time related commands in linux terminal.