Get Unix time in Python
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In Python, I want to get the current Unix timestamp and then store the value for the long term and be handled by non-Python systems. (I am not merely trying to compute the difference between two timestamps within the same program run.)
Calling the function time.time() seems to be a very reasonable and concise way to get the desired timestamp... until I read the documentation:
Return the time in seconds since the epoch as a floating point number. The specific date of the epoch and the handling of leap seconds is platform dependent. On Windows and most Unix systems, the epoch is January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 (UTC) and leap seconds are not counted towards the time in seconds since the epoch. This is commonly referred to as Unix time. To find out what the epoch is on a given platform, look at gmtime(0).
The phrase "epoch ... is platform dependent" is a warning sign. A weasel phrase is "most Unix systems". What are examples of Unix or non-Unix systems where Python's time.time()'s epoch is not 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z?
