Function: current-time

current-time is a function defined in timefns.c.

Signature

(current-time)

Documentation

Return the current time, as the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00.

If the variable current-time-list is nil, the time is returned as a pair of integers (TICKS . HZ), where TICKS counts clock ticks and HZ is the clock ticks per second. Otherwise, the time is returned as a list of integers (HIGH LOW USEC PSEC) where HIGH has the most significant bits of the seconds, LOW has the least significant 16 bits, and USEC and PSEC are the microsecond and picosecond counts.

You can use time-convert to get a particular timestamp form regardless of the value of current-time-list.

View in manual

Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 20.3.

Source Code

// Defined in /usr/src/emacs/src/timefns.c
{
  return make_lisp_time (current_timespec ());
}