Perl epoch time before 1970 formatting

Question

I have problem formatting and dealing with dates before the epoch 1/1/1970 in Perl, dates comes back as negative integer:

my $time=timelocal(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1969);
print "$time\n"; 
$theTime = localtime($time); 
print "the time is good: $theTime\n\n";

How to deal with dates before the epoch in Perl, both on unix and windows have the same problem Perl 5.8.8. PHP shows the date normal without problems.

Answer 1

have you tried using DateTime?

Answer 2

If perl print a negative integer, this is the good behaviour since 01/01/1970 is the zero day of this date format. Search the word negative on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_epoch

An example in shell :

$ date -d "1957-10-04T00:00:00Z" +%s
-386380800

This is correct.

Answer 3

I need is to pass this negative number to localtime or some other function to return formated date time array.

Ok, what's stopping you?

# ActivePerl on Windows
>perl -E"say ''.localtime(-386380800)"
Thu Oct  3 20:00:00 1957

# Linux
$ perl -E'say "".localtime(-386380800)'
Thu Oct  3 16:00:00 1957

# Cygwin
$ perl -E'say "".localtime(-386380800)'
Thu Oct  3 16:00:00 1957