Alarm

[DemosthenesB]

How can I make a program that keeps time? That counts seconds and displays them as an output? I am trying to make an alarm clock program that after so many seconds opens up a sound file.

I am not experienced with C but I know the basics of "if" and "while" statements(I am fairly experienced with Macromedia's Flash Actionscript). I have made an alarm program in Actionscript but it is very easy to count seconds as you have a timeline and can change the fps, and then it is also easy to open sound files as they can be imported into the file. But in C I don't know how to do these things.

Any suggestions?

[palin]

<time.h> has time functions in it

on Linux/Unix there is a function called
time( time_t* __timer);

if you call it like so time(NULL) it will return the number of seconds since some date in the 70s since I assume you only wish to use the actual time elasped between a start point and another point. obviously just get a start value then you can compare it with repeated calls.

Hope this helps.

[DemosthenesB]

Thank you very much palin, very helpful.

[ender]

Another thing you could do, supposing that your OS supports posix signals and such, is use signals to do it, you could set up your own signal handler and use the interval timer functions to set up your interval. That is how I would do it, then you don't have to do repetitive queries to time() or the like.

The signal is called SIGALRM, and the you can use either the alarm() function that works in seconds, or the setitimer() function which can work in microseconds.

Just a suggestion,
Ted Morse