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

Hi,
I have the following code that list down the starting time of each process: 
use Data::Dumper;
use Carp;
use Proc::ProcessTable;
use Time::Local::Extended qw(:ALL);

$FORMAT = "%-6s %-8s %-24s \n";
$t      = new Proc::ProcessTable;

my $now = localtime;
print "NOW: $now\n";

printf( $FORMAT, "PID", "START", "TIME_DIFF"  );
foreach $p ( @{ $t->table } ) {

    my $start = $p->start;

    #my $diff = $start - $now; #doesn't seem to work

    my $diff = 1000; # this is just a dummy

    printf( $FORMAT,
        $p->pid, scalar( localtime( $p->start ) ), $diff
        );
}

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My problem is how can I find/print out the time difference (in seconds) for starting time and current time? Namely the time difference of: 
my $now = localtime;

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and 
scalar( localtime( $p->start ) )

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Regards,
Edward

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Finding Time Difference of Localtime
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 25, 2007 at 15:13 UTC

    Don't use localtime in the first place. Use time or gmtime and POSIX::strftime instead.

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $start = time();
sleep 10;
my $end = time();
my $duration = $end - $start;
print "It took me $duration seconds\n";
my $start_date = strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime($start);
my $end_date = strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime($end);
print "I was started on $start_date and ended on $end_date\n";

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    Updated after Aldebaran actually checked the code.

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[d/l]
      Don't use localtime in the first place. Use time or gmtime and POSIX::strftime instead.

      I just happened on to this and wonder if this is the behavior that Corion was expecting out of this. This isn't "my thread" or anything; I was just searching (again) for ways to time programs. I'm hoping to find a native one that works on Termux.

      $ ./1.strftime.pl 
Argument "Sun Dec  1 00:29:42 2019" isn't numeric in subtraction (-) a
+t ./1.strftime.pl line 9.
Argument "Sun Dec  1 00:29:52 2019" isn't numeric in subtraction (-) a
+t ./1.strftime.pl line 9.
It took me 0 seconds
Usage: POSIX::strftime(fmt, sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = -1
+, yday = -1, isdst = -1) at ./1.strftime.pl line 11.
$ cat 1.strftime.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;    
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $start = gmtime();
sleep 10;
my $end = gmtime();
my $duration = $end - $start;
print "It took me $duration seconds\n";
my $start_date = strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", $start;
my $end_date = strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", $end;
print "I was started on $start_date and ended on $end_date\n";

$

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[reply]
[d/l]

        Whoops! Thank you for checking this, that's not what I want.

        You want to use time, not gmtime, and use strftime( localtime( $start )) to turn the seconds back into strings.

        I'll fix the above post.

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[d/l]
Re: Finding Time Difference of Localtime
by kyle (Abbot) on Oct 25, 2007 at 15:12 UTC
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[d/l]
Re: Finding Time Difference of Localtime
by lorn (Monk) on Oct 25, 2007 at 15:16 UTC
[reply]
      That's exactly what I did just recently: 
      use Time::HiRes;
...
my $start = Time::HiRes::time();
...
do your job
...
my $stop = Time::HiRes::time();

my $duration = $stop-$start;

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      It gives you the difference with a lot more precision that whole seconds, but if that's what you care about it should eb easy to round the number.
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[d/l]

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