Hi all,
well am a linux application developer, programming GUI frontends and security tools. one day i was given the task of reverse engg of some apps. for a high level reversal i used strace. when i straced some gui applications (kedit, gftp, xterm) i found that they call gettimeoftheday() at a very regular intervals, even if there is no activity. since i have tested applications on most common platforms for gui (KDE, GNOME, X) there must be some reason for that. anyone have an idea?
well the ques might be silly, but it just keeps coming like a splinter in my mind.

Iam not sure whether this is correct or not. . . The program calls gettimeoftheday to compare time because they might use it in crash logs or something like tht.

Iam no linux app developer, iam also a newbie

for some apps like editors/office style, that prob make a temp backup every n seconds... eg vi has a "swap file" you can use to recover after a crash eg vim -r filename.