Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I'm having a brain dump. I need to find out what the timestamp was at midnight of the current day. I know that  my $time = time; will give me the timestamp as of right now, but I will always need the timestamp as of 12:00am. Any ideas how I could do this?

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Re: Finding Timestamp
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Apr 15, 2003 at 19:24 UTC 
    use Time::Local;

my $midnight_time = timelocal(0,0,0, (localtime)[3,4,5] );

print scalar localtime $midnight_time;

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    See Time::Local - timelocal expects 6 parameters in the same order as localtime returns them. The first three represent the current time of day; you just pass zeroes instead.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re: Finding Timestamp
by dmitri (Priest) on Apr 15, 2003 at 19:21 UTC 
    # get current time
my $time = time;

# get seconds, minutes, and hours since midnight
my ($sec, $min, $hr) = (gmtime($time))[0..2];

# subtract the sum of time since midnight
$time -= ($hr * 3600 + $min * 60 + $sec);

print $time, "\n";

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Re: Finding Timestamp
by Improv (Pilgrim) on Apr 15, 2003 at 19:21 UTC
    One way is to call the date command (if you're on unix), as such: 
    $stamp = `date --d "0:00" "+%s"`
    (note that this usage might be specific to the GNU version of date, so your milage might vary on solaris or other unices)

    Another is to use Date::Manip 
    use Date::Manip;
print UnixDate("0:00", "%s");

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      Both methods are a last resort, at best, though. date is not available on Windows machines (if that's a concern) and requires a new process to be spawned just to get the date. Date::Manip is about the heaviest module you can use for any job and shouldn't be considered before other alternatives have been ruled out.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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