You can also convert milliseconds to date & time and the other way around. Before this moment millions of applications will need to either adopt a new convention for time stamps or be migrated to 64-bit systems which will buy the time stamp a 'bit' more time. This site provides the current time in milliseconds elapsed since the UNIX epoch (Jan 1, 1970) as well as in other common formats including local / UTC time comparisons. It doesnt count the leap seconds and increases by 86400 seconds. It may also jump far away from the epoch when the computer is suspended or when the system time is directly modified. On this date the Unix Time Stamp will cease to work due to a 32-bit overflow. The Unix epoch is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1st, 1970 (UTC/GMT). In principle you could 'compute the epoch' by doing Instant::now () - (SystemTime::now () - std::time::UNIXEPOCH), but since the system time is not monotonic, this value may drift away from the unix epoch over time. Unix epoch time represents the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on January 1, 1970. This is very useful to computer systems for tracking and sorting dated information in dynamic and distributed applications both online and client side. Seconds The original Unix facilities used whole seconds, leading to the Year 2038 Problem when we reach the limit of seconds since 1970 if stored as a 32-bit integer. It should also be pointed out (thanks to the comments from visitors to this site) that this point in time technically does not change no matter where you are located on the globe. Another issue with count-since-epoch time tracking is the time unit, with at least four levels of resolution commonly used. Its the number of milliseconds / second since a start date. The main purpose of the UNIX time mechanism (regardless of measurement unit conventions) is to define a point in time. Unix time (also known as POSIX time or Epoch time) is a system for describing instants in time. Therefore, the unix time stamp is merely the number of seconds between a particular date and the Unix Epoch. It appears to be (relatively) officially defined as the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. This count starts at the Unix Epoch on January 1st, 1970 at UTC.

The unix time stamp is a way to track time as a running total of seconds.