Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!frankland-river!pem
From: pem@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au (Paul E. Maisano)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: reverse of localtime()
Message-ID: <1176@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au>
Date: 28 Feb 90 00:40:10 GMT
Organization: Australian AI Institute
Lines: 24

I am writing a perl program at the moment which is doing a lot of
manipulation of dates and times.

I am maintaining a text file which contains dates such as 24/04/89 and
to manipulate these dates easily I would like to convert that to "the
number of seconds since Jan 1970". This is the reverse of what localtime()
does. [I can't keep the number of seconds in the file rather than the
date either since the file may be modified by hand.]

My unix manual (on SUN/OS) says there is a timelocal() function.
Is this a worthwhile addition to perl ? I can't see a simple way of
doing it in perl.

I was originally going to write the program in C for speed reasons but
I think perl would be fast enough. 

I don't really want to write it in C but... :-(

------------------
Paul E. Maisano
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
1 Grattan St. Carlton, Vic. 3053, Australia
Ph: +613 663-7922  Fax: +613 663-7937
Email: pem@aaii.oz.au