Get previous hour of UTC/GMT time using Perl - perl

Question

I have a script which will print Start & End time of previous hour of UTC/GMT.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);
my ($tmp_date, $tmp_hour, $Start, $End);
my $date = strftime '%Y-%m-%d', gmtime();
print "Date:$date\n";
my $hour = strftime '%H', gmtime();
print "Hour:$hour\n";
if ($hour == "00"){
$tmp_date = $date-1;
$tmp_hour = "23";
} else {
$tmp_hour = $hour-1;
$tmp_date = $date;
}
$a = length($tmp_hour);
if ($a == 1 ){
$tmp_hour="0".$tmp_hour;
}
$Start = $tmp_date.".".$tmp_hour."00";
$End = $tmp_date.".".$hour."05";
if ($End =~ /0005/){
$tmp_date = `TZ=GMT-12 date +%Y%m%d`;
$End =$tmp_date.".".$hour."05";
}
print "Start:$Start, End:$End\n";
For example, lets say now UTC time is: Wed Jun 10 10:18:57 UTC 2020
This should print Start & End time as 2020-06-10.0900 2020-06-10.1005 respectively.
This script is working as expected. But when Daylight savings happens will there be any impact on fetching Start & End time?
I want experts suggestions how can I avoid unnecessary if statements and achieve it by the use of Perl module itself.
PS: Perl version: v5.10.1. Please suggest Perl modules which comes with standard Perl installation (Ex: POSIX, Time::Local etc.) for solution of above problem.

Answer 1

As you're using gmtime(), any DST changes will have no effect at all.
I'm not sure why your end time ends with '05', I would have thought that the end of the hour comes at '00'.
Here's how I'd write it with Time::Piece and Time::Seconds.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use Time::Piece;
use Time::Seconds;
my $end = gmtime->truncate(to => 'hour');
my $start = $end - ONE_HOUR;
my $format = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S';
say 'Start: ', $start->strftime($format);
say 'End: ', $end->strftime($format);
If you really want the end time to be five past the hour, then add this line after the ONE_HOUR line:
$end += (5 * ONE_MINUTE);
You can, of course, use any of the standard strftime() sequences to change the format of the output.