Greetings monks;

I'm trying to get a very simple timezone display going without having to install the rather heavy DateManip or DateTime groups of modules (Which seemingly require copious amounts of modules).
I live in CST, and the following works:

$ENV{TZ} = "America/New_York"; my $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y %c", localtime; print "$now_string\n";
Which prints:
Tue Nov  1 17:40:54 2005 Tue 01 Nov 2005 05:40:54 PM EST
However, if I try the following:
$ENV{TZ} = "America/Chicago"; my $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y %c", localtime; print "$now_string\n"; $ENV{TZ} = "America/New_York"; $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y %c", localtime; print "$now_string\n";
I get:
Tue Nov  1 16:41:08 2005 Tue 01 Nov 2005 04:41:08 PM CST
Tue Nov  1 16:41:08 2005 Tue 01 Nov 2005 04:41:08 PM EST

Which is clearly more than a little odd.
I'm not seeing an obvious difference here in methodology - which means that there's either a bug in localtime(), or I'm missing something - and I'm putting money on it being my problem.

I can, of course, move to using one of the larger modules - that is a valid option, but I'd prefer to not have to resort to doing so when it appears localtime() should be able to handle this properly.
(I'm on a Linux machine running Debian, if it helps)

My thanks;

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

In reply to TimeZoning oddities by JPaul

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.