title: How to represent uninitialized value for time_t type in c
body: <p>I have a time_t type variable (from <code>&lt;time.h&gt;</code>) that stores the time of a failure, and would like to initialize it to a "null" value that will be the final value if no error occurs.  Is there a standard way to set a time_t variable to some kind of known null value?  I see that the <code>time()</code> function returns -1 if an error occurs, maybe this is best, but wonder if I can just assign an integer value to a typedef like that.  Maybe I'd need to use this...?</p>
  
  <p><code>time_t failTime = (time_t)(-1);</code></p>