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Perl's localtime and gmtime — an epoch second broken into calendar fields, or formatted as the fixed-width C timestamp — for code being carried across from Perl.

Version

0.0.11 zef:lizmat

Depends

nothing outside the core

License

Artistic-2.0

Its own test suite

1 file, green

Checked

2026-09-15 against Raku++ 3.28.0 and Rakudo 2026.08

Where it lives

raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install P5localtime

zef install P5localtime writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

Raku has DateTime, which is better than what Perl offered in every way that matters. That is no help when you are moving a working Perl program across a line at a time and want each step to keep passing its tests. This distribution is part of a family that supplies Perl's builtins under their own names with their own semantics, so the port can proceed without rewriting the date handling first and the rewrite can come later.

It gives the two decomposition builtins. gmtime breaks an epoch second into calendar fields in UTC, localtime in the process's own timezone, and either will format the fields as the fixed-width string C's asctime produces.

Fields, or a string #

use P5localtime;

my @g = gmtime(1_000_000_000);
say @g.elems;
say @g[0..8].join(' ');

my ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year) = @g;
say "{$year + 1900}-{$mon + 1}-$mday {$hour}:{$min}:{$sec}";

say gmtime(Scalar, 1_000_000_000);
say gmtime(Scalar, 0);
say gmtime(0)[9], ' ', gmtime(0)[10];

11
40 46 1 9 8 101 0 251 0
2001-9-9 1:46:40
Sun Sep  9 01:46:40 2001
Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
0 UTC

The list is Perl's nine fields with two Raku additions on the end: the UTC offset in seconds and the zone abbreviation. Passing the Scalar type object as the first argument selects the string form instead — that is the module's spelling of Perl's list-versus-scalar context, and it has to be the literal type object, not an anonymous $.

The two traps Perl programmers already know are intact, deliberately. mon is zero-based, so September is 8, and year counts from 1900, so 2001 is 101. The example adds them back.

The one thing to know #

localtime reads the timezone once, when the process starts, and nothing you do afterwards moves it:

use P5localtime;

my $before = localtime(Scalar, 0);
%*ENV<TZ> = 'UTC';
my $after = localtime(Scalar, 0);
say $before eq $after;
say gmtime(Scalar, 0);
say gmtime(0)[9];

True
Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
0

Assigning to the environment variable at run time has no effect, because the zone was resolved before your first line ran. The only way to steer localtime is to set TZ in the environment before launching the program. That also means any example, test or golden file built on localtime is pinned to whichever machine produced it — which is why everything printed above uses gmtime, the half of the pair that answers the same thing everywhere.

Calling either with no epoch argument at all uses the current time, which is never what a test wants.