[OT] Number of seconds from epoch

[sanPerl]

I am writing perl scripts for nagios. I am getting a value $time_new from a subroutine. I am using

$time = `date -d '$time_new' '+%s'`;

to get the number of seconds from epoch (for e.g. date -d 'Tue Feb 13 19:04:04 IST 2007' +%s, gives you 1171373644). It is running fine on Linux, when I run my script on SunOS Unix, the script fails.
I checked with man pages of SunOS and found that there is NO +%s option in Unix date command.
Any suggestions please

[Corion]

Why use an external utility when there is Time::Local or localtime to convert to and from epoch times?

Update: Or, if you start out with a formatted string like the above, Time::Piece::strptime or DateTime::Format::Strptime, to get a real time object back.

[fmerges]

Hi,

In add to this, take care of what you really need, mean localtime or gmtime. In scientific stuff and in other fields you usually use UT as a convention instead of the local time, so take care with this...

Regards,

[almut]

Just in case you're too lazy to split up your date string into something that Time::Local can handle, and don't mind slurping in 240k of Perl code, you could also use the module Date::Manip

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Date::Manip qw(UnixDate);

my $time_new = 'Tue Feb 13 19:04:04 IST 2007';

my $time = UnixDate($time_new, "%s");

print "secs since the Epoch: $time\n";  # prints 1171373644

[sanPerl]

Thanks a lot to everyone, for wonderful suggestions.

[klekker]

time should do.

update: ah sorry, no help at all... just figured out that you wanted to convert a date! :(

update2:
From the perl faq http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq4.html: How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds?

If it's a regular enough string that it always has the same format, you can split it up and pass the parts to timelocal in the standard Time::Local module. Otherwise, you should look into the Date::Calc and Date::Manip modules from CPAN.


k

[davorg]

time gives you the current time as an epoch value. Sounds to me like sanPerl wants to get the epoch value for a specific time. If that's true then Time::Local is a better solution.