http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=307747


in reply to Get Time Diff *without* Date::Manip

I guess it depends on what you mean by "External". The Benchmark module is part of the core Perl distro, and does exactly what you want. (from the pod):

use Benchmark; $t0 = new Benchmark; # ... your code here ... $t1 = new Benchmark; $td = timediff($t1, $t0); print "the code took:",timestr($td),"\n";