It sounds that on "one or two" of your servers, there is a program time.exe installed, most likely from the Cygwin suite of programs, which preempts the shell builtin time command.

To solve your problem, maybe you want to look at the Perl builtin functions of localtime and gmtime() together with the POSIX::strftime() function:

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);

print strftime "%Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S", localtime();
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There are lots of format strings that strftime knows to insert into your string, like the weekday and more, should you need it.

Another solution would be to alter your PATH environment variable to make sure the system's time command comes before any others.

--
sgifford's Web page

The problem is that the "time /t" command is a Windows command.  You can't use it to get the time on a Linux/Unix system.

However, you can use Perl's time function to get the current time (specified in seconds since the epoch), which will work on any system.  Then, use localtime to return the time in a readable format:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

my $time = time;
my $timestr = localtime($time);
print "Current date/time is $timestr\n";
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Oh, and one further note ... you can't assign a variable to the results from a system call.  If you really wanted to assign a variable, say $x, to the results of the time /t system call in Windows, you would use the backtick "`" operator (and then likely chomp to remove the newline):

my $x = `time /t`;  # Assign $x to the system time (only in Windows)
chomp $x;           # $x now holds something like "10:51 AM"
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Nothing Perl-ish about this: it appears you have bash or some other unix-y shell installed on the machines in question. (Do you have Cygwin installed by chance?) You're not getting the Windows time program (which prints the current time), but the shell one (which reports how long it took to run a program -- among other info).

use strict;
my $now = scalar(localtime);
print "It is $now\n";
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There's a neat little trick you can use here - just invoke some (pointless) redirection:

system("time /t <nul");
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That should work on all of your Windows boxes. Another option that I think will work everywhere for you is to specifically invoke the cmd.exe shell:

system("cmd /C time /t");
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Cheers,
Rob

As backticks spawn a new shell each time, the simplest solution would be to set the path to empty prior to invoking the (builtin) time command:

path='' & time /t
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The change to the environment will only last for the duration of the spawned shell, so the will be no knock on effect for subsequent spawned shells.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

It may be Windows, but you have unix tools installed, and the PATH is setup such that these are found before Windows's tools. Fix that and you won't have to change your code.