type

time_t

<ctime>
Time type
Type capable of representing times and support arithmetical operations.

This type is returned by the time function and is used as parameter by some other functions of the <ctime> header.

It is almost universally expected to be an integral value representing the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00 hours, Jan 1, 1970 UTC. This is due to historical reasons, since it corresponds to a unix timestamp, but is widely implemented in C libraries across all platforms.