Last updated on November 11th, 2024 at 11:31 am

One effective way to show the server’s date and time in Perl is by using the functions sprintf and localtime. While there are several ways to retrieve the date, I am choosing the simplest method to get the current date with Perl.

We are also using strftime and extracting the Hour:Minute:Second as shown below.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use POSIX qw(strftime);

# Get day, month, and year from the localtime function
($day, $month, $year) = (localtime)[3,4,5];

# Format the date to YYYY-MM-DD
$my_date = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d\n", $year+1900, $month+1, $day);

# Print the formatted date
print "Todays date is $my_date";

# Get the current time in HH:MM:SS format
my $get_time = strftime "%H:%M:%S", localtime;

# Print the formatted time
print "Time is $get_time\n";

Explanation:

  1. use POSIX qw(strftime);: Imports the strftime function from the POSIX module to format date and time.
  2. (localtime)[3,4,5];: Extracts the day, month, and year values from the current local time.
  3. sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d\n", $year+1900, $month+1, $day);: Formats the date to YYYY-MM-DD, adjusting the year by adding 1900 and month by adding 1, since localtime returns the year as years since 1900 and months as zero-indexed.
  4. strftime "%H:%M:%S", localtime;: Retrieves the current time in HH:MM:SS format.

Sample Output

$ ./today.pl
Todays date is 2022-02-18
Time is 03:09:21


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