Hi all,

Was just playing around with some of the code in Sean M Burke's Perl and LWP (nice book, BTW) and encountered some unexpected behaviour with one of the examples from chapter three which uses $response->current_age(). Here's the program:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use LWP;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new();

my $response = $browser->get('http://www.perl.com/images/tabs/tab-perl
+blk.gif',
                            ':content_cb' => \&hex_dump,
                            ':read_size_hint' => 123,
                            );

print "Waiting a bit...\n";
sleep 10;

my $age = $response->current_age();
print "$age\n";                 # debug
my $days  = int($age/86400);
$age -= $days * 86400;
my $hours = int($age/3600);
$age -= $hours * 3600;
my $mins  = int($age/60);
$age -= $mins    * 60;
my $secs  = $age;
print "The document is $days days, $hours hours, $mins minutes, and $s
+ecs seconds old.\n";

sub hex_dump {
    my ($data, $response) = @_;
    print length($data), " bytes:\n";
    print '  ', unpack('H*', substr($data,0,16,'')),
         "\n" while length $data;
    return;
}
[download]

On my machine (SuSE Linux 8.0, Perl 5.6.1, LWP 5.66), this program outputs "The document is 0 days, 8 hours, 57 minutes, and 28 seconds old."

But according to the HTTP::Response man page, $response->current_age

calculates the "current age" of the response as specified by draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-07 section 13.2.3. The age of a response is the time since it was sent by the origin server. The returned value is a number representing the age in seconds.

I'm puzzled as to why this program does not say the document is 10 seconds old. The only thing I can think of is that the "current age" of the document (about 9 hrs) is roughly the same as the time difference between my location (Austria) and O'Reilly in CA. Could that be the reason, or is it something else entirely?

Thanks in advance, mooseboy