As most perlmonks will know, ctime, mtime and atime returned by stat() need to be taken with a bit of salt, namely a timezone offset flag.

Doing stat <file> outside of perl, on the command line, I will get stuff like:
Access: 2010-02-09 15:51:56.500000000 +0100
Modify: 2008-10-09 17:16:33.750000000 +0200
Change: 2008-10-09 17:16:34.265625000 +0200
Inside Perl, Perl handles these offsets automagically, so when I feed the stat() epoch of let's say $mtime to localtime() I will get a timezone corrected date/time. Same for gmtime(), where I get GMT values.

But where does this magic come from?
The epoch I get from stat() doesn't hold it. How can I get a timezone corrected, for example GMT epoch without doing stat()->$mtime->gmtime()->convert humand-readable back to epoch?

In reply to stat() and time-zone-offsets? by isync

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