How do you read the system time and date in Perl?

Question

I need to read the system clock (time and date) and display it in a human-readable format in Perl.

Currently, I'm using the following method (which I found here ):

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
@months = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec);
@weekDays = qw(Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun);
($second, $minute, $hour, $dayOfMonth, $month, $yearOffset, $dayOfWeek, $dayOfYear, $daylightSavings) = localtime();
$year = 1900 + $yearOffset;
$theTime = "$hour:$minute:$second, $weekDays[$dayOfWeek] $months[$month] $dayOfMonth, $year";
print $theTime; 

When you run the program, you should see a much more readable date and time like this:

9:14:42, Wed Dec 28, 2005 

This seems like it's more for illustration than for actual production code. Is there a more canonical way?

Answer 1

Use localtime function:

In scalar context, localtime() returns the ctime(3) value:

 $now_string = localtime; # eg, "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994"

Answer 2

You can use localtime to get the time and the POSIX module's strftime to format it.

While it'd be nice to use Date::Format's and its strftime because it uses less overhead, the POSIX module is distributed with Perl, and is thus pretty much guaranteed to be on a given system.

use POSIX;
print POSIX::strftime( "%A, %B %d, %Y", localtime());
# Should print something like Wednesday, January 28, 2009
# ...if you're using an English locale, that is.
# Note that this and Date::Format's strftime are pretty much identical

Answer 3

As everyone else said "localtime" is how you tame date, in an easy and straight forward way.

But just to give you one more option. The DateTime module . This module has become a bit of a favorite of mine.

use DateTime;
my $dt = DateTime->now;

my $dow = $dt->day_name;
my $dom = $dt->mday;
my $month = $dt->month_abbr;
my $chr_era = $dt->year_with_christian_era;

print "Today is $dow, $month $dom $chr_era\n";

This would print "Today is Wednesday, Jan 28 2009AD". Just to show off a few of the many things it can do.

use DateTime;
print DateTime->now->ymd;

It prints out "2009-01-28"

Answer 4

Like someone else mentioned, you can use localtime, but I would parse it with Date::Format . It'll give you the timestamp formatted in pretty much any way you need it.

Answer 5

以清晰易读的格式打印本地时间的最简单的单行打印语句是：

print scalar localtime (); #Output: Fri Nov 22 14:25:58 2019