If you need the timediff's only then why not create a separate marker file and with -M you can get the age of the file in seconds? note, that "age" is actually the age in seconds from the moment the perl script started, so if you use a daemon, it will not work, however, if your script starts regularly or on-demand, this works:

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

my $TESTFILE='/tmp/x';
unless (-f $TESTFILE){
    open(TF, '>',$TESTFILE) or die $!; 
    close(TF);
}

my $AGE_seconds = -r $TESTFILE ? int( (-M _) *60*60*24) : -1;
print "the file $TESTFILE is $AGE_seconds seconds old.\n";

[download]

As for the timelocal(), roll your own, with a simple regular expression you are all set. Just be careful to not match a date in the other fields.

In reply to Re: Converting a date to a string and back by FreeBeerReekingMonk
in thread Converting a date to a string and back by JonesyJones

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