Date and time demos - Perl example

Handling Dates and Time example from a Well House Consultants training course
More on Handling Dates and Time [link]

Source code: dante Module: P216

=head1 Date and Time handling in Perl

There are lots (and lots (and lots)) of date
and time handling modules on the CPAN - Dave
Cross once joked that there is one for every
day of the month, and he's not far out.

But the build in ones often suffice ....

localtime and gttime convert a time from seconds
from 1.1.1970 into a list of 9 elements (second,
minute, hour, day, month, year, dayofweek,
dayofyear, daylightsaving) and timelocal and
timegm do (almost) the reverse. I say 'almost'
because the year from localtime come out as years
from 1900, whereas the input to timelocal is a
2 figure number, and the year is between 1939 and
2037.

localtime and gmtime are built in
timelocal and timegm are part of the standard Time::Local module

=cut

use Time::Local;

# Current time, and the time the script started
$now = time();
$started = $^T;
print "$now\n";

# Pause for 3 seconds
sleep 3;

# Demo of scalar and list context
$sca = localtime();
@stuff = localtime($started);
print "$sca\n@stuff\n";

# And conversion back
$nye = timelocal(@stuff);
print "$nye\n";

__END__

Sample output:

Dorothy:p82 grahamellis$ perl dante
1225570118
Sat Nov 1 20:08:41 2008
38 8 20 1 10 108 6 305 0
1225570118
Dorothy:p82 grahamellis$

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