$time1 = time;
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If that's too coarse for you, you can try using Time::HiRes:

use Time::HiRes 'time';
$time1 = time;
sleep 2;
$time2 = time;
printf "Time difference = %.2f seconds\n", $time2-$time1;
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More on time:

The time function gives you the number of seconds that passed since Jan 1, 1970. The number of seconds since 1/1/70 are also known as 'epoch seconds'.

time is quite suitable/simple for calculating the passage of seconds.

Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

print $cgi->hidden('time',time);
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my $time=time-param('time');
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print $cgi->h2(sprintf("It took you %02d:%02d to take the quiz.",int($
+time/60),int($time%60)));
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I don't know what the purpose of the timer is, but I thought I'd let you know of a potential risk factor if it is important that it not be faked. If you place the initial time in a hidden form variable a clever individual should be able to fake their test time.

A better solution might be to use something like CGI::Session to store the initial time on the server and a session id on the client via your hidden form variable (or in a cookie or URL) to make certain that the timer is not abused.

This is the way I've always done it.

my $start = time;

#do your work/quiz/etc.

my $end = time;

my $time_taken = $end-$start;

print "Quiz/Work/Etc... took".$time_taken." seconds\n";
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You can take the resultant epoch seconds and split them out into hours and minutes using some basic math.

---

Grygonos

Maybe I'm missing something, but why don't you just save the time as epoch seconds instead of some type of YYMMDD HHMMSS format. Then subtracting to find the net time is a snap.

use Time::Local;
my @now = localtime();
my $epoch_time1 = timelocal(@now);
sleep 10;
@now = localtime();
$epoch_time2 = timelocal(@now);
print $epoch_time2 - $epoch_time1;
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my $start = time;

# Quiz is taken

my $end = time;
my $elapsed = $end - $start;
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Cheers - L~R

it seems that they all work when the codes you gave are in one part. I tried it as



&starttime;
&stoptime;


sub starttime{
my $start = time;
sleep 5;
}

sub stoptime{
my $end = time;
my $elapsed = $end - $start;

print $elapsed;
}
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and it always prints out as 1071679507 seconds

That is because in sub stoptime, your script doesn't know what $start is, since you only declared that in the starttime sub. Now if you'd do it like the following, it would print out 5:

my $start;
my $end;

&starttime;
&stoptime;

sub starttime{
   $start = time;
   sleep 5;
}

sub stoptime{
   $end = time;
   print $end - $start."\n";
}
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Update: If you'd put "use strict;" in the beginning of your little snippet, Perl would warn you about this with: Global symbol "$start" requires explicit package name at test line 14.

--
b10m