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Asked: 2026-05-11T15:07:59+00:00

In Perl, I’d like to look up the localtime in a specific timezone. I

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In Perl, I’d like to look up the localtime in a specific timezone. I had been using this technique:

$ENV{TZ} = 'America/Los_Angeles'; my $now = scalar localtime; print 'It is now $now\n'; # WORKS: prints the current time in LA

However, this is not reliable — notably, if I prepend another localtime() call before setting $ENV{TZ}, it breaks:

localtime(); $ENV{TZ} = 'America/Los_Angeles'; my $now = scalar localtime; print 'It is now $now\n'; # FAILS: prints the current time for here instead of LA

Is there a better way to do this?

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  1. Use POSIX::tzset.

    use POSIX qw(tzset);  my $was = localtime; print 'It was      $was\n';  $ENV{TZ} = 'America/Los_Angeles';  $was = localtime; print 'It is still $was\n';  tzset;  my $now = localtime; print 'It is now   $now\n'; 
     $ perl -v  This is perl, v5.8.8 built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi  Copyright 1987-2006, Larry Wall  Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.  Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on this system using 'man perl' or 'perldoc perl'.  If you have access to the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.  $ perl tzset-test.pl It was      Wed Apr 15 15:58:10 2009 It is still Wed Apr 15 15:58:10 2009 It is now   Wed Apr 15 12:58:10 2009
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