Get the current time in C

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;
}

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.