That is exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize all of the time zone specifiers.

Example:

use Time::Piece;

my $pubdate = "Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:50:00 PDT";
my $t      = Time::Piece->strptime( "Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:50:00 PDT", "
+%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z" );
my $offset = $t->tzoffset;

printf( "%s\n", $t );
printf( "%s\n", $t->tzoffset->seconds );
[download]

ghodmode@home:perl ] ./timepiece.pl
garbage at end of string in strptime: PDT at /usr/lib/perl/5.10/Time/Piece.pm line 470.
Thu Jun 11 11:50:00 2009
0

I think I'm going to rely on the call to the shell's date for now. Later, if I want to make the program more portable, I'll probably just create a hash with a short list of time zone specifiers to convert them to the appropriate numeric offset. That would break if the program encountered a new zone, but it would work for my purposes.

Of course Date::Time is the right way to do it, but it's less portable because of the external dependency.

I like Time::Piece, though. I didn't know about this module and I anticipate using it a lot more in the future.

--
-- Ghodmode