Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities

Introduction

You can use the Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities to manipulate the date-time information and geographic location data used by a Macintosh computer. A Macintosh computer contains a battery-operated clock chip that maintains information on the current date-time.

Geographic location and related time-zone information is stored in extended parameter RAM.

You can use the routines provided by the Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities to

get the current date and time
set the current date and time, if necessary
convert between internal date-time structures
get and set the geographic location and time-zone information
determine the current measurement system
determine the number of elapsed microseconds since system startup

To make the best use of the Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities, you should be familiar with the international resources, especially the numeric-format and long-date-format resources, and the Script Manager.

The programming interface for Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities is declared in the following header files:

Mac OS X header:	CoreServices/CoreServices.h
Mac OS 9 headers:	UTCUtils.h, DateTimeUtils.h