Time difference in seconds

Question

In a Perl program I have a variable containing date / time in this format:

Feb 3 12:03:20  

I need to determine if that date is more than x seconds old (based on current time), even if this occurs over midnight (e.g. Feb 3 23:59:00 with current time = Feb 4 00:00:30).

The perl date / time information I've found is mind-boggling. Near as I can tell I need to use Date::Calc, but I am not finding a seconds-delta. Thanks :)

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $Start = time();
sleep 3;
my $End = time();
my $Diff = $End - $Start;

print "Start ".$Start."\n";
print "End ".$End."\n";
print "Diff ".$Diff."\n";

This is a simple way to find the time difference in seconds.

Answer 2

In the spirit of TMTOWTDI, you can leverage the core Time::Piece :

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Piece;
my $when = "@ARGV" or die "'Mon Day HH:MM:SS' expected\n";
my $year = (localtime)[5] + 1900;
my $t = Time::Piece->strptime( $year . q( ) . $when, "%Y %b %d %H:%M:%S" );
print "delta seconds = ", time() - $t->strftime("%s"),"\n";

$ ./mydelta Feb 3 12:03:20

delta seconds = 14553

The current year is assumed and taken from your localtime.