file_time(3alleg4)

💖 file_time — bestie edition 💖

okay so real talk, this is a page from the Allegro manual (the Allegro game programming library, iykyk) and it's literally just one tiny lil function that tells you when a file got touched last. short king energy, but so useful. let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

file_time — returns the modification time of a file. yes that's it, that's the whole vibe. it lives in the Allegro game programming library 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <allegro.h>

time_t file_time(const char *filename);

look at that. two lines. immaculate. ✨

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically file_time hands you back the modification time of a file — and before you ask, that's measured in number of seconds since 00:00:00 GMT 1/1/1970 🕰️ (yes bestie, the Unix epoch, that iconic little timestamp origin story, we love her).

and here's the part you gotta know 👀 — if the file does not exist, or literally any error occurs, the function is gonna return zero and it stashes the system error code in errno. so like, if you get a big fat 0 back, that's your sign something went sideways 🙈. check errno and go off, detective 💅

no cap: a return value of 0 is the "it went wrong" signal here, so don't just vibe past it. peep errno fr fr.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• file_exists(3alleg4) — for when you just wanna know if the file's even there 🧚
• file_size_ex(3alleg4) — for when you wanna know how big it is 👑

and that's the whole page, bestie, short and sweet 🎀

sign-off time: this gorgeous lil doc is brought to you by Allegro, version 4.4.3 🌸 the manpage itself is file_time(3alleg4), and yeah, she ate. periodt 💖✨