The TZ environment variable isn't the same as the system time zone. Most (Unix) systems will have their system clock running on UTC - but have most processes use a different TZ (There aren't that many places that actually have UTC as their timezone - even the UK and Portugal use daylight saving and are hence not on UTC, which doesn't do daylight saving). And TZ can vary from process to process, or even switch during the lifetime of the process.

I do not know a portable way to determing the system time zone. If /etc/adjtime exists, one might look at its third line, however, there's no garantee that line is actually correct.

I've no idea whether Windows system typically use UTC or local time.

use Tongue::In::Cheek;
print `date +%Z`;
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Keep in mind that while there is a system-wide timezone default, this is user overridable. Imagine an Internet host with 3 users logged in via SSH from Australia, Costa Rica and Zimbabwe. Each user is in a different timezone.

Is there a way to capture the system time zone in perl?

Yes.

(SLAMS FIST ON DESK WHILE LAUGHING GIDDILY)

Oh Lord, do I ever need coffee ...

If the TZ environment variable is misset, then I'm not sure what you're going to do. Here is what I got off of our Sun server:

$ env | grep TZ
TZ=US/East-Indiana
$
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This might be a sysadmin thing to correct rather than a perl script thing.

--
tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
- Chick McGee

Try it,

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time
+);
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That neither gives you a timezone (the last field only indicates whether daylight saving time is active or not), nor does it give you system time information. localtime gives you the time for whatever timezone your process has set (or inherited). Which may be the same as your system timezone, but on a typical Unix system, most likely is not.