create text files with mtime between time range - perl

Question

I found the below one-liner, that creates 50 text files
perl -MPath::Tiny -wE'
path("dir/s".$_.".txt")->spew("some data...$_\n") for 1..50
but it creates all the files with mtime as current time.
Is it possible to have the mtime between a date range?. like Jan 2016 to Dec 2018 for the text files?.
I understand that I have to use Time::Piece module, but I don't see Time::Piece module in my RHEL Perl which is 5.010.

Answer 1

There is the touch method in Path::Tiny, and the rest is about splitting up the desired range of dates. Note that the script below creates files (10 by default) with very simple-minded names, so please run in a brand new directory so to not overwrite something
perl -MPath::Tiny -MTime::Piece -wE'
$n = shift // 10;
($beg, $end) = map {
Time::Piece->strptime($_, "%Y%m%d")->epoch
} (20160101, 20181201);
$step = int ($end-$beg)/$n;
for (1..$n) {
$f = path("s$_.txt");
$f->spew("data..$_\n");
$f->touch($beg += $s)
' 5
Chaining calls to the desired path(..)->spew(..)->touch(..) doesn't work since spew returns true/false and not an object. (The touch does return the object and so it can have methods chained to it, but here it has to go after spew since spew changes the modification time.)
The above creates files
-rw-rw-r--. 1 xxx 8 Jul 31 2016 s1.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 xxx 8 Mar 1 2017 s2.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 xxx 8 Sep 30 2017 s3.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 xxx 8 May 1 2018 s4.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 xxx 8 Nov 30 2018 s5.txt
You'll probably want to fiddle with the step size and first/last time stamps.
Apparently there is a problem with Time::Piece, likely indicating a problem with that system† since the module has been in core since 5.9.5. Then I'd use Time::Local::timelocal
use Time::Local;
my $seconds_epoch = timelocal $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year;
where $mday goes from 1 while all other start at 0. Note that while it is traditional to provide the year subject to +1900 (so 116 for 2016) the normal years are accepted as well. So
$beg = timelocal 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2016;
$end = timelocal 0, 0, 0, 31, 11, 2018;
or, for more flexibility with dates
($beg, $end) = map {
($yr, $m, $d) = unpack "A4A2A2";
timelocal 0, 0, 0, $d, $m-1, $yr
} (20160101, 20181231)
†  The problem of the missing Time::Piece is described in this post in Dave Cross's blog. Also see comments under the question and a chat.