The
adjtime()
function gradually adjusts the system clock (as returned by
gettimeofday(2)).
The amount of time by which the clock is to be adjusted is specified
in the structure pointed to by
delta.
This structure has the following form:
If the adjustment in
delta
is positive, then the system clock is speeded up by some
small percentage (i.e., by adding a small
amount of time to the clock value in each second) until the adjustment
has been completed.
If the adjustment in
delta
is negative, then the clock is slowed down in a similar fashion.
If a clock adjustment from an earlier
adjtime()
call is already in progress
at the time of a later
adjtime()
call, and
delta
is not NULL for the later call, then the earlier adjustment is stopped,
but any already completed part of that adjustment is not undone.
If
olddelta
is not NULL, then the buffer that it points to is used to return
the amount of time remaining from any previous adjustment that
has not yet been completed.
RETURN VALUE
On success,
adjtime()
returns 0. On failure, -1 is returned, and
errno
is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
EINVAL
The adjustment in
delta
is outside the permitted range.
EPERM
The caller does not have sufficient privilege to adjust the time.
Under Linux the
CAP_SYS_TIME
capability is required.
CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD, System V.
NOTES
The adjustment that
adjtime()
makes to the clock is carried out in such a manner that the clock
is always monotonically increasing.
Using
adjtime()
to adjust the time prevents the problems that can be caused for certain
applications (e.g.,
make(1))
by abrupt positive or negative jumps in the system time.
adjtime()
is intended to be used to make small adjustments to the system time.
Most systems impose a limit on the adjustment that can be specified in
delta.
In the glibc implementation,
delta
must be less than or equal to (INT_MAX / 1000000 - 2)
and greater than or equal to (INT_MIN / 1000000 + 2)
(respectively 2145 and -2145 seconds on i386).
BUGS
A longstanding bug
meant that if
delta
was specified as NULL,
no valid information about the outstanding clock adjustment was returned in
olddelta.
(In this circumstance,
adjtime()
should return the outstanding clock adjustment, without changing it.)
This bug is fixed
on systems with glibc 2.8 or later and
Linux kernel 2.6.26 or later.
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.