5.8.8 localtime bug??

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

I seem to have discovered a problem with localtime in perl 5.8.8. I'm trying to use ENV{TZ} to change the timezone and in 5.8.8, localtime seems to glom onto whatever timezone it is first called with.

My test script looks like:
$ENV{TZ} = "America/Los_Angeles";
print scalar localtime(time()), "\n";
$ENV{TZ} = 'America/New_York';
print scalar localtime(time()), "\n";

On my system (Ubuntu 8.04, perl 5.8.8-12) output looks like:
Tue Jul 22 21:38:00 2008
Tue Jul 22 21:38:00 2008

On my ISP's system(unknown Linux, perl 5.6.1) output is:
Tue Jul 22 21:39:22 2008
Wed Jul 23 00:39:22 2008

I've tried POSIX and various Time:: modules and behavior is the same. I can't believe this is a bug, but don't know where to go from here and have been beating my head on it most of the day.

Any suggestions??
Thanks
Steve S.

Comment on 5.8.8 localtime bug??

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Re: 5.8.8 localtime bug?? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 23, 2008 at 05:03 UTC
Use `tzset`. `use POSIX qw( tzset ); $ENV{TZ} = "America/Los_Angeles"; tzset(); print scalar localtime(time()), "\n"; $ENV{TZ} = 'America/New_York'; tzset(); print scalar localtime(time()), "\n";` [download] `Tue Jul 22 22:02:29 2008 Wed Jul 23 01:02:29 2008` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: 5.8.8 localtime bug?? by sjs_bebop (Initiate) on Jul 23, 2008 at 05:20 UTC
That worked and I thought I had tried it. Long day I guess... Thank you very much!	[reply]