Print Date and Time In Visual Studio C++ build?

Question

How would I print the date and time for the purposes of the build. Ie: When the console for my application starts up I want to do this:

Binary Build date: 03/03/2009 @ 10:00AM

I think this would be a super useful function for all applications to have behind the scenes for programmers, especially in a team environment.

Is there a simple way to do this using Visual Studio 2008 in C++. Thanks.

Answer 1

Use preprocessor's __DATE__ and __TIME__.

printf("Binary build date: %s @ %s\n", __DATE__, __TIME__);

For making sure that cpp file that contains this code is really compiled, I use touch-utility for file as a pre-build step: touch file.cpp

Touch.bat:

@copy nul: /b +%1 tmp.$$$
@move tmp.$$$ %1

Answer 2

You can use the macros __TIME__ and __DATE__. Note the double underscores. These are unrolled at compile time and hence you will get the last compile time saved in your file(s).

Answer 3

Note that the time and date macros only work as desired if the particular file containing them is guaranteed to be compiled during every build.

Answer 4

One way of doing this would be using the built-in __DATE__ and __TIME__ macros. From MSDN (for VS 2005):

__DATE__: The compilation date of the current source file. The date is a string literal of the form Mmm dd yyyy. The month name Mmm is the same as for dates generated by the library function asctime declared in TIME.H.

__TIME__: The most recent compilation time of the current source file. The time is a string literal of the form hh:mm:ss.

Answer 5

Similar to Virne's answer I created a simple header file called "BuildDate.h" with the following contents:

#define BUILD_DATE __DATE__ " " __TIME__

I touch the file using GnuWin32 touch command in my pre-build event:

touch.exe BuildDate.h

Then I include the header file in any code where I want access to the BUILD_DATE string. E.g.:

#include "BuildDate.h"
...
logger->Log("Build Date: " BUILD_DATE);