Question

How can I determine the current date and time of various countries using a PERL script that executes on a server in the US? For example, getDTnow() should determine the current date and time on the server and use that to return the date and time of various countries.

P.S: It would be great if this can be done using only the built-in functions, without any external modules.

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Conclusion: Date maths is [use swear word here] complicated and easy to get wrong. Other perl gurus on IRC, groups and other parts of the net confirmed what Ether had been advicing me – use DateTime. DVK‘s solution is also pretty neat for those of you who don’t mind messing with the perl environment. (Note: Though on windows, the caveats section of the Time::Piece docs says one should be careful while ‘Setting $ENV{TZ} in Threads on Win32‘).

Answer 1

DateTime is a wonderful library that can use standard timezones to do everything you desire and more:

use DateTime;

# returns local time in Italy
my $dt = DateTime->now(time_zone => 'Europe/Rome');

# prints time in desired format
print "The current date and time in Italy is: ", $dt->strftime('%Y-%m-%d %T');