.\" This man page is Copyright (C) 2003 Lennert Buytenhek.
.\" Permission is granted to distribute possibly modified copies
.\" of this page provided the header is included verbatim,
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.TH iv_time 3 2003-03-29 "ivykis" "ivykis programmer's manual"
.SH NAME
iv_now, iv_validate_now, iv_invalidate_now \- ivykis time handling
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B #include <iv.h>
.sp
.BI "extern struct timespec " iv_now ";"
.br
.BI "void iv_validate_now(void);"
.br
.BI "void iv_invalidate_now(void);"
.br
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B iv_now
is a global variable that reflects the current time-of-day.  Applications
written to the ivykis API generally require to know the current time-of-day
in many places, and therefore effort is done to cache this quantity.
.PP
The contents of
.B iv_now
might be stale.  Calling the function
.B iv_validate_now
ensures that the current contents of
.B iv_now
are up-to-date.
.PP
The function
.B iv_invalidate_now
is called to invalidate the currently cached time-of-day.  This function
should be called after any operation that takes a significant amount of
wall clock time.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR ivykis (3),
.BR iv_examples (3)