I seem to have discovered a problem with localtime in perl 5.8.8. I'm trying to use ENV{TZ} to change the timezone and in 5.8.8, localtime seems to glom onto whatever timezone it is first called with.

My test script looks like:
$ENV{TZ} = "America/Los_Angeles";
print scalar localtime(time()), "\n";
$ENV{TZ} = 'America/New_York';
print scalar localtime(time()), "\n";

On my system (Ubuntu 8.04, perl 5.8.8-12) output looks like:
Tue Jul 22 21:38:00 2008
Tue Jul 22 21:38:00 2008

On my ISP's system(unknown Linux, perl 5.6.1) output is:
Tue Jul 22 21:39:22 2008
Wed Jul 23 00:39:22 2008

I've tried POSIX and various Time:: modules and behavior is the same. I can't believe this is a bug, but don't know where to go from here and have been beating my head on it most of the day.

Any suggestions??
Thanks
Steve S.

In reply to 5.8.8 localtime bug?? by sjs_bebop

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.