The Portable Way to Extract Date and Time from a File's mtime in C++

This article discusses a portable method for extracting date and time information from a file's modification time (mtime) in C++. It provides practical examples and code snippets to illustrate the approach.

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After I finished my Time in C++ series , a reader asked a seemingly simple question:

“What is the portable way to extract the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second from a file’s modification time? I tried, and I couldn’t get it to work reliably on macOS and Windows.”

Fair question. You call std::filesystem::last_write_time() , you get back a time point, and you want the calendar components. How hard can it be?

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