[Rachael]

This is good, I can see the benefits of using gettime for this. I already use unix timestamps for quite a lot of similar applications in the script, some of which are over a much greater time period.

Assuming the result of gettime() is an integer, how large is it? can it be stored in a variable without wrapping to negative?

Does a unix timestamp ever roll around to zero? effectively causing an error in the longer time comparisons that I have. and if so how often?
[edit] ****** answered my second question