I use localtime() to display the time on my websites, record when posts to my message boards were made, and many more purposes probably even when I should be using gmtime. Imagine my surprise when I discovered there is no analogous function in php! This got me wondering why and I found the explanation that php runs on the server side and therefore has no knowledge of the time on the user's machine. But wait. How could Perl possible know then? I tried looking at the headers being sent over guessing something was hidden in there, but I couldn't find anything. So how does Perl get the time off the user's machine?