Perl epoch time before 1970 formatting - perl

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