[OT] Number of seconds from epoch

sanPerl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am writing perl scripts for nagios. I am getting a value $time_new from a subroutine. I am using

$time = `date -d '$time_new' '+%s'`;
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to get the number of seconds from epoch (for e.g. date -d 'Tue Feb 13 19:04:04 IST 2007' +%s, gives you 1171373644). It is running fine on Linux, when I run my script on SunOS Unix, the script fails.
I checked with man pages of SunOS and found that there is NO +%s option in Unix date command.
Any suggestions please

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Re: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 13, 2007 at 13:41 UTC
Why use an external utility when there is Time::Local or localtime to convert to and from epoch times? Update: Or, if you start out with a formatted string like the above, Time::Piece::strptime or DateTime::Format::Strptime, to get a real time object back.	[reply]
Re^2: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by fmerges (Chaplain) on Feb 13, 2007 at 14:13 UTC
Hi, In add to this, take care of what you really need, mean localtime or gmtime. In scientific stuff and in other fields you usually use UT as a convention instead of the local time, so take care with this... Regards, fmerges at irc.freenode.net	[reply]
Re: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by almut (Canon) on Feb 13, 2007 at 14:17 UTC
Just in case you're too lazy to split up your date string into something that `Time::Local` can handle, and don't mind slurping in 240k of Perl code, you could also use the module `Date::Manip` `#!/usr/bin/perl use Date::Manip qw(UnixDate); my $time_new = 'Tue Feb 13 19:04:04 IST 2007'; my $time = UnixDate($time_new, "%s"); print "secs since the Epoch: $time\n"; # prints 1171373644` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by sanPerl (Friar) on Feb 13, 2007 at 15:43 UTC
Thanks a lot to everyone, for wonderful suggestions.	[reply]
Re: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by klekker (Pilgrim) on Feb 13, 2007 at 13:57 UTC
time should do. update: ah sorry, no help at all... just figured out that you wanted to convert a date! :( update2: From the perl faq http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq4.html: How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds? If it's a regular enough string that it always has the same format, you can split it up and pass the parts to timelocal in the standard Time::Local module. Otherwise, you should look into the Date::Calc and Date::Manip modules from CPAN. k	[reply]
Re^2: [OT] Number of seconds from epoch by davorg (Chancellor) on Feb 13, 2007 at 14:02 UTC
time gives you the current time as an epoch value. Sounds to me like sanPerl wants to get the epoch value for a specific time. If that's true then Time::Local is a better solution. -- <http://dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]