Z007 Job Time and Date

Authors: J. Harms, E. Jansen, A. Michalon, J. Zoll, A. Berglund, T. Cass, C. Wood, H. Renshall.
The DATIME package interfaces with the system of any particular machine to obtain the current calendar date and time, as well as the central processor time used by and remaining to the job.

Structure:

SUBROUTINE subprograms
User Entry Names: DATIME, DATIMH, TIMEX, TIMEL, TIMED, TIMEST
External References: Machine dependent
COMMON Block Names: /SLATE/ ISL(40)

Usage:

    CALL DATIME(ID,IT)

for convenience of further processing by the user.

    CALL DATIMH(ND,NT)

    CALL TIMEX(T)

    CALL TIMEL(T)

    CALL TIMED(T)

    CALL TIMEST(TLIM)

It must be called once (subsequent calls are ignored) before any calls to TIMEX and TIMEL. Before this routine is called TIMEX will return zero and TIMEL will return 999.0. TLIM is an input floating point value which will be used inside TIMEL as if it were the job time-limit. The first call to TIMEST also establishes the time origin for subsequent calls to TIMEX and TIMEL.

Accuracy:

IBM: The RMS error returned in consecutive calls to TIMED without any intermediate code is of the order of 3 $\mu$ sec on the the CERN IBM 3090 with a minimum time for one call of 20 $\mu$ sec. The timing distribution has a long tail, however, and any individual measurement could take as long as four or five times this value. TIMEX is accurate to within a tenth of a second and TIMEL only to the nearest second.

Notes:

1. The symbols yy,mm,dd,hh,mm,ss used above stand for the two decimal digits of year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds.
2. NT and ND in the call to DATIMH are 2-word vectors on machines with a character-capacity of less than 8 characters per word.
3. The information returned by these routines is obtained by a system request. On some machines this is expensive in real time, so one should avoid too many calls, to TIMEL in particular.
4. Some machine/operating system configurations do not have a value for timelimit, for example interactive work under VM-CMS (IBM) or VMS (VAX) or no-limit batch job classes under VMS. In these cases a constant time-left of 999.0 seconds is returned, unless the time limit has been set with TIMEST.

Examples:

Suppose the date is Sept 16, 1976, and the time of day 19h 24m 55s.

    CALL DATIME(ID,IT)

    CALL DATIMH(ND,NT)

Z008