3.2.88 localtime

localtime EXPR

This function converts the value returned by time to a nine-element list with the time corrected for the local time zone. It's typically used as follows:

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
        localtime(time);

All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of a struct tm. (That's a bit of C programming lingo - don't worry about it.) In particular this means that $mon has the range 0..11, $wday has the range 0..6, and the year has had 1,900 subtracted from it. (You can remember which ones are 0-based because those are the ones you're always using as subscripts into 0-based arrays containing month and day names.) If EXPR is omitted, it does localtime(time). For example, to get the name of the current day of the week:

$thisday = (Sun,Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat)[(localtime)[6]];

The Perl library module Time::Local contains a subroutine, timelocal(), that can convert in the opposite direction.

In scalar context, localtime returns a ctime(3)-like string based on the localtime value. For example, the date command can be emulated with:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime'

See also POSIX::strftime() in Chapter 7 for a more fine-grained approach to formatting times.