How do I convert a date/time to epoch time (unix time/seconds since 1970) in Perl?

Question

Given a date/time as an array of (year, month, day, hour, minute, second), how would you convert it to epoch time, i.e., the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT?

Answer 1

If you're just looking for a command-line utility (i.e., not something that will get called from other functions), try out this script. It assumes the existence of GNU date (present on pretty much any Linux system):

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

$_ = (join ' ', @ARGV);
$_ ||= ;

chomp;

if (/^[\d.]+$/) {
    print scalar localtime $_;
    print "\n";
}
else {
    exec "date -d '$_' +%s";
}

Here's how it works:

$ Time now
1221763842

$ Time yesterday
1221677444

$ Time 1221677444
Wed Sep 17 11:50:44 2008

$ Time '12:30pm jan 4 1987'
536790600

$ Time '9am 8 weeks ago'
1216915200