When invoking clock_gettime() may the returned tv_nsec field actually exceed a second?

Question

When you invoke clock_gettime() it returns a timespec structure.

struct timespec {
    time_t tv_sec; /* seconds */
    long tv_nsec; /* nanoseconds */
};

I don't find in the man page a garantee that the tv_nsec won't exceed one second. Does the garantee exist actually ? Could it be dependant on the library (glibc?) implementation for linux?

The key idea is : do I need to 'normalize' any result coming from the clock_gettime() function?

Answer 1

According to opengroup

The tv_nsec member is only valid if greater than or equal to zero, and less than the number of nanoseconds in a second (1000 million). The time interval described by this structure is (tv_sec * 10'-.4m'9'.4m' + tv_nsec) nanoseconds.

So according to opengroup, it looks official that it must be less than 1 second.