Get the current time in C

Copy-pasted from here:

/* localtime example */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int main ()
{
  time_t rawtime;
  struct tm * timeinfo;

  time ( &rawtime );
  timeinfo = localtime ( &rawtime );
  printf ( "Current local time and date: %s", asctime (timeinfo) );
  
  return 0;
}

(just add void to the main() arguments list in order for this to work in C)

Initialize your now variable.

time_t now = time(0); // Get the system time

The localtime function is used to convert the time value in the passed time_t to a struct tm, it doesn't actually retrieve the system time.

Easy way:

#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    time_t mytime = time(NULL);
    char * time_str = ctime(&mytime);
    time_str[strlen(time_str)-1] = '\0';
    printf("Current Time : %s\n", time_str);

    return 0;
}

To extend the answer from @mingos above, I wrote the below function to format my time to a specific format ([dd mm yyyy hh:mm:ss]).

// Store the formatted string of time in the output
void format_time(char *output){
    time_t rawtime;
    struct tm * timeinfo;
    
    time(&rawtime);
    timeinfo = localtime(&rawtime);
    
    sprintf(output, "[%d %d %d %d:%d:%d]", timeinfo->tm_mday,
            timeinfo->tm_mon + 1, timeinfo->tm_year + 1900,
            timeinfo->tm_hour, timeinfo->tm_min, timeinfo->tm_sec);
}

More information about struct tm can be found here.

#include<stdio.h>
#include<time.h>

void main()
{
    time_t t;
    time(&t);
    printf("\n current time is : %s",ctime(&t));
}