Re: Perl and Time zones.

[Dominic Mitchell]

the hatter wrote:

Yes, you're only setting the environment for the process that's executing.
System picks a default $TZ that it hands to all processes spawned.  If one
of these is your shell, it'll inherit it, though you may have a login
profile that changes it to something else before you see it.  You can
change $TZ in your shell, without affecting the parent.  You run perl, it
inherits the environment (and thus $TZ) from your shell, or if you've not
tinkered with it, from the system.  You can change $TZ in perl, when the
program finishes, its enviroment is discarded.  While you program is
running, the shell still keeps its original $TZ, regardless of what the
program changes (and thus any oter programs it starts while your perl one
is running will also get the shells settings, not those of the perl
process)

This leads to some very handy shell aliases for finding out the time in new york / california.

% alias | grep date
estdate='TZ=EST5EDT date'
pstdate='TZ=PST8PDT date'

-Dom

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