Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module P216. This topic is presented on public course
Perl bootcamp
Was 8 p.m. on 28th February in Los Angeles before or after 8 a.m. in Tokyo on 1st March? Perl has a very neat trick to handling dates and times, meaning that such questions can be easily resolved. We'll show you that trick, and we'll show you the various functions that you can use to handle dates and times in Perl.
Articles and tips on this subject | updated |
239 | What and why for the epoch The Epoch occurred on 1st January 1970 ... at midnight, at the start of the day, GMT. It's an important concept in many programming languages, which work with times and dates before and after the epoch - it means that you can compare dates and times easily, even where month ends and different timezones ... | 2008-05-16 |
765 | Perl - turning seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds So often you'll be working within a program in seconds - elapsed times, delays, that sort of thing - but want to report times back to the user in terms of hours, minutes and seconds. The conventional programming way to do this is to do a series of divisions and grab the remainder, but in Perl you can ... | 2006-06-17 |
454 | Time conversions in Perl Time isn't the easiest unit on which to do arithmetic, and dates expressed as a human-readable string are quite tricky to sort. Just imagine trying to write a program to work out whether 9 p.m. Pacific time on 28th Feb was before or after 3 a.m. in the UK on 1st March. And did you realise that, sorted ... | 2006-06-05 |
Examples from our training material
chivvy | Using %SIG to timeout keyboard entry |
dante | Date and time demos |
dt1 | file last modified (days ago) |
dt2 | dt2 - file last modified (seconds from 1.1.1970) |
dt3 | current date and time (system dependent!) |
dt4 | use of time and localtime |
dt5 | compare a stated date and time with now! |
hf | Modified "chivvy" - perhaps less OS dependent |
sigint | Use of Signals in Perl to trap ^C (Control C) |
tim | Converting times between epoch seconds and regular time |
Pictures
Perl - a modern language for ancient languages
Background information
Some modules are
available for download as a sample of our material or under an
Open Training Notes License for free download from
[here].
Topics covered in this module
So far.
File status operators.
stat on a file.
Via system commands.
How Perl handles dates and times.
Other date information available.
Convertors.
Convert from epoch seconds into "human readable" form:.
Convert from human readable form to epoch seconds.
Handling centuries.
Elapsed time sleep.
alarm.
Summary.
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