libc's time(3) function says it returns the number of seconds since the epoch, but it ignores leap seconds, so it actually does not return the number of seconds

libc's time(3) function says it returns the number of seconds since the epoch, but it ignores leap seconds, so it actually does not return the number of seconds since the epoch (since there have been several leap seconds since the epoch). It returns the number of actual seconds that have elapsed since the epoch, the only way to do this is to ignore leap seconds. When leap seconds occur, they don't actually exist, they just change the offset to keep things in sync. Every second the time(3) function returns exists uniquely and none are skipped, there are no ambiguous values, which you can't say if leap seconds were not ignored.