As far as converting elapsed seconds into a "human readable" format, have a look at this thread, which bought about several suggestions.

Cheers,
Darren :)

Thank You very much. It really helped :). Thanks, Nisha

Take a look at DateTime

use DateTime;

$sttime = DateTime->now();
sleep(61);
$entime = DateTime->now;
$elapse = $entime - $sttime;
print "Elapsed time : ".$elapse->in_units('minutes')."m\n";

__OUTPUT__
Elapsed time : 1m
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The way you've shown is right. However, you may want to make a function from it, if you don't want to clutter the code with time calls.

Either do this:

use warnings;
use strict;

sub measure_time(&) {
    my($btime, $etime);
    $btime = time;
    &{$_[0]}();
    $etime = time;
    warn "elapsed time was: ", $etime - $btime, " s\n";
}

measure_time {
    sleep 60;
};

__END__
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Or, if you want to measure time in such a way that it doesn't line up with scopes, then do this:

use warnings;
use strict;

{
my @btime;
sub BEGIN_TIME {
    push @btime, time;
}
sub END_TIME {
    @btime or die "error: END_TIME without BEGIN_TIME";
    my($btime, $etime) = (pop @btime, time);
    warn "elapsed time was ", $etime - $btime, " s\n";
}
END {
    @btime and warn "warning: BEGIN_TIME without END_TIME";
}
}

sub foo {
    sleep 2;
    END_TIME;
    sleep 2;
}

BEGIN_TIME;
sleep 3;
foo();

__END__
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Also see the timethis function in the Benchmark module. If you want to time the whole script, not just some parts of it, and you're on a unix-like system, use the time shell builtin or the time(1) program.

The way you use to calculate the elapsed time is correct. You can use any of the various modules for date/time calculations to nicely format it in a human readable way.

Incidentally, almost by definitition, there's no need to create unnecessary temporary variable that are used once only:

my $sttime = time;
sleep(60);
print "Elapsed time : ", time - $sttime;
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