Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Name

gmtime

Synopsis

gmtime expr
                  

Converts a time string as returned by the time function to a nine-element list with the time correct for Greenwich Mean Time zone (a.k.a. GMT, UTC, etc.). Typically used as follows:

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

All list elements are numeric and come straight out of a C language struct tm. 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 elements are 0-based because you’re always using these as subscripts into 0-based arrays containing month and day names.) If expr is omitted, it does gmtime(time). For example, to print the current month in London:

$london_month = (qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
        Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec))[(gmtime)[4]];

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

In scalar context, gmtime returns a ctime(3)-like string based on the GMT time value.