Intense googeling failed to turn out a single decent example of how to program the RTC. all I could find were examples for the C5000/4000 models, which seems work differently as I was unable to locate any of the header files required to get the sample code to compile.
the closest I got was finding the RTC user manual, but it's no help at all on the subject of actually programming the real time clock using C
I'd appreciate to no end a working example or a pointer to where such an example exists
I'm assuming you are using TI's DSP/BIOS, as this seems to be the most common manner in which the C6000 family of DSPs are used. The DSP/BIOS operating system provides a number of APIs for interfacing with the real time clock (the CLK module). These APIs abstract away the registers and other low-level details of the RTC as described in the RTC user manual. This is generally the simplest way to use the clock as it avoids the need to manually "program" it.
See the CLK section in the API reference.