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

I have worked out how to convert a date string to epoch seconds - but how do i do this if i want to do the reverse - the user enters the epoch seconds, and the script converts this to dd/mm/yyyy...?

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Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by lhoward (Vicar) on Mar 19, 2001 at 19:20 UTC
    There are several perl modules that can do this for you. My favorite for this task is Time::CTime (check out the strftime function). This task is also real easy to write yourself using perl's built-in localtime function.

    Of course, this all assumes that your Epoch is Jan 1, 1970 (which is a pretty safe bet) If that isn't your epoch you'll need to do more conversion first.

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      @time = (localtime())[3..5];
$time[1]++;
$time[2] += 1900;
print join ('/', @time);

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      can't get it shorter :(
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[d/l]

        Update: I thought I was in a different thread so much of this is incorrect. My apologies to slayven. ):

        Note that this does d-m-yyyy which isn't what was asked for (the order is wrong and you don't pad with zeros). 

        use mapcar;
print join '-', mapcar {sprintf "%02d",pop()+pop}
    [(localtime())[5,4,3]],[1900,1,0];

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        Is my contribution (which does yyyy-mm-dd since that is simply a better format).

        See mapcar -- map for more than one list for one needed part.

                - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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      my $epoch_seconds = "?";
      my $date = scalar localtime($epoch_seconds);
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Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by davorg (Chancellor) on Mar 19, 2001 at 20:34 UTC

    That's what the localtime function does. Pass it a number of epoch seconds and it'll return an array of values that you can use to build a human-readable date.

    Or, even easier, use localtime in conjunction with the POSIX::strftime function.

    use POSIX 'strftime';

my $epoch = 985015768;

print strftime('%d/%m/%Y', localtime($epoch));

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    --
    <http://www.dave.org.uk>

    "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
    and the boring jobs bearable" - me

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      ty dave, works for me:-) 
          use POSIX 'strftime';
        $epoch = $escrowClose_e;
        $epoch_o = $escrowOpen_e;

        $redate = strftime('%m/%d/%Y', localtime($epoch));
        $opendate = strftime('%m/%d/%Y|%H:%M', localtime($epoch_o));

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(tye)Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by tye (Sage) on Mar 19, 2001 at 21:49 UTC
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Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by lachoy (Parson) on Mar 19, 2001 at 22:30 UTC

    You can also use the pure-perl Date::Format module:

    perl -MDate::Format -e 'print time2str( "%Y-%m-%e", 192948519 )'
perl -MDate::Format -e 'print time2str( "%Y-%m-%e", 19294851 )'

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    Respectively returns:

    1976-02-11
1970-08-12

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    Chris
    M-x auto-bs-mode

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Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by frankus (Priest) on Mar 20, 2001 at 18:20 UTC
    There are lots of good answers here, my answer is more generic: the Perl Cook Book has a section on this, and when you understand that bit of the book there are loads more examples that can help you everyday ;-) 

    --
    Brother Frankus.
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Re: Convert epoch seconds to date
by belize (Deacon) on Aug 04, 2001 at 23:58 UTC
    How about this subroutine. I'm new to Perl, but think this works OK?:

    sub unix_to_date {

my ($date) = $_[0]; # reads in variable passed to subroutine
my (@months) = qw!Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug sep Oct Nov Dec!; #c
+reates array of month names
@time = (localtime($date))[3,4,5]; #creates array of date from unix ti
+me
$time[2] += 1900; # converts year to proper format
return "$time[0]-$months[$time[1]]-$time[2]";

}

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    You now call this with: 

    $date_from_unix = &unix_to_date(epochtime);

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