First off, I'd like to say that I'm relatively new to the world of Perl (~4 months) and find the open and sharing atmosphere of perlmonks.org extremely conducive to learning. Thanks to everyone who contributes to this wonderful site.

Now for the business at hand:

I'm trying to parse a date of the form:
Mon Apr 18 15:17:29 2005
and converting it to unix time (epoch seconds) using Time::Local. Here is the code I'm using:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use Time::Local;
     
my %months = (
    'Jan' => 0,
    'Feb' => 1,
    'Mar' => 2,
    'Apr' => 3,
    'May' => 4,
    'Jun' => 5,
    'Jul' => 6,
    'Aug' => 7,
    'Sep' => 8,
    'Oct' => 9,
    'Nov' => 10,
    'Dec' => 11,
    );
    
my ($wday, $mon, $mday, $hr, $min, $sec, $year);
 
my $date = 'Mon Apr 18 15:17:29 2005';
   
if (($wday, $mon, $mday, $hr, $min, $sec, $year) = $date =~ /(\w+)\s+(
+\w+)\s+(\d+)\s(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)\s+(\d+)/) {
    foreach my $key (keys %months) {
        $mon =~ s/$key/$months{$key}/i;
    }
    
    my $local_epoch = timelocal($sec, $min, $hr, $mday, $mon, $year);
    my $gmt_epoch = timegm($sec, $min, $hr, $mday, $mon, $year);

}
[download]

Here's what is returned:

$local_epoch = 1113851849
$gmt_epoch = 1113837449

Seeing as how my $ENV{TZ} = US/Eastern
I'm wondering why the number of seconds returned for $local_epoch is larger than that returned for $gmt_epoch? During daylight saving time (EDT), the difference between GMT and local time is -4 hours (ie: we're 4 hours behind GMT time) on the East Coast.

Shouldn't the value $gmt_epoch be larger than that of $local_epoch?

Thanks in advance,
John