>How do you get internal state in seconds of DateTime instance? 
>Or convert it to Time instance? 
>
>I want to compare two times with variable precision.
>Below is my try to parse time from Common Log Format.
>
>require 'date'
>str1 = '20/Nov/2003:08:08:09 +0200'
>str2 = '20/Nov/2003:08:04:09 +0200'
>t1 = DateTime.strptime(str=str1, fmt='%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %Z')
>t2 = DateTime.strptime(str=str2, fmt='%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %Z')
>
>#what is difference in minutes between these 2 times?
>
>#example with Time instances
>t1 = Time.new
>t2 = Time.new + 2*60 #2 minutes later
>
>puts (t1-t2).abs > 60 #diff more than minute

Use to_i if you want it as an integer number of seconds

$ ruby -we 'puts Time.now.to_i'
=> 1080754316

/Stefan