The times() function fills the tms structure pointed to by buffer with time-accounting information. The tms structure, defined in <sys/times.h>, contains the following members:

clock_t    tms_utime;
clock_t    tms_stime;
clock_t    tms_cutime;
clock_t    tms_cstime;

All times are reported in clock ticks. The specific value for a clock tick is defined by the variable CLK_TCK, found in the header <limits.h>.

The times of a terminated child process are included in the tms_cutime and tms_cstime members of the parent when wait(2) or waitpid(2) returns the process ID of this terminated child. If a child process has not waited for its children, their times will not be included in its times.

The tms_utime member is the CPU time used while executing instructions in the user space of the calling process.

The tms_stime member is the CPU time used by the system on behalf of the calling process.

The tms_cutime member is the sum of the tms_utime and the tms_cutime of the child processes.

The tms_cstime member is the sum of the tms_stime and the tms_cstime of the child processes.

Upon successful completion, times() returns the elapsed real time, in clock ticks, since an arbitrary point in the past (for example, system start-up time). This point does not change from one invocation of times() within the process to another. The return value may overflow the possible range of type clock_t. If times() fails, (clock_t)-1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

The times() function will fail if:

EFAULT

The buffer argument points to an illegal address.

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

time(1), timex(1), exec(2), fork(2), time(2), wait(2), waitid(2), waitpid(2), attributes(5)