printing element of anonymous array

[perltux]

How can I rewrite the following two commands in one command, i.e. without having to assign the output of gmtime to an array first?

perl -e 'my @date=gmtime(time); print $date[6]; '

I had hoped the following would work but I get syntax error:

perl -e 'print (gmtime(time))[6]; '

[Corion]

This is because Perl sees something else, it associates the parentheses with print():

print(gmtime(time))    [6];

This makes no sense to Perl.

To fix this, you need one more set of parentheses:

print(   (gmtime(time))[6] );

[perltux]

Many thanks for the quick explanation and solution!

[Athanasius]

Hello perltux,

FTR, you can also disambiguate the syntax with a plus sign:

 1:41 >perl -e "print (gmtime(time))[6];"
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

 1:41 >perl -e "print ((gmtime(time))[6]);"
6
 1:41 >perl -e "print +(gmtime(time))[6];"
6
 1:41 >

Hope that helps,

[dave_the_m]

The outer parentheses are being grabbed by the print function. You need

perl -e 'print ((gmtime(time))[6]);'

PS - technically, it's a list, not an anonymous array, being returned by gmtime.

Dave.

[poj]

alternatively

perl -e 'print [gmtime(time)]->[6];'

[1nickt]

Using the core Perl module Time::Piece (which overrides the built-in functions localtime and gmtime, providing functions that return objects):

use Time::Piece;
print gmtime->wday;

[haukex]

Just for TIMTOWTDI, Time::gmtime has been in core ~10 years longer:

use Time::gmtime;
print gmtime->wday;

But there is a difference: Time::Piece's wday index is 1-based (1=Sunday) while gmtime and Time::gmtime's wday is 0-based (0=Sunday).

[1nickt]

True, but there's a reason Time::Piece was placed in core, and it ain't because Time::gmtime had feature bloat.

Besides the aforementioned wday(), which provides a one-indexed numerical value for the day of the week, Time::Piece also provides _wday() and day_of_week() for getting the zero-indexed value, as well as fullday() to get the full name of the day, and day() and wdayname() for an abbreviated version of the name.