Determining Local Time in another Timezone - perl

Question

How can I determine the current date and time of various countries using a PERL script that executes on a server in the US? For example, getDTnow() should determine the current date and time on the server and use that to return the date and time of various countries.
P.S: It would be great if this can be done using only the built-in functions, without any external modules.
Conclusion: Date maths is [use swear word here] complicated and easy to get wrong. Other perl gurus on IRC, groups and other parts of the net confirmed what Ether had been advicing me - use DateTime. DVK's solution is also pretty neat for those of you who don't mind messing with the perl environment. (Note: Though on windows, the caveats section of the Time::Piece docs says one should be careful while 'Setting $ENV{TZ} in Threads on Win32').

Answer 1

DateTime is a wonderful library that can use standard timezones to do everything you desire and more:
use DateTime;
# returns local time in Italy
my $dt = DateTime->now(time_zone => 'Europe/Rome');
# prints time in desired format
print "The current date and time in Italy is: ", $dt->strftime('%Y-%m-%d %T');

Answer 2

You can control which timezone localtime returns in via TZ environmental variable:
local $ENV{TZ} = ":/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Asia/Tokyo";
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday) = localtime();
print "$sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday\n"'
# Prints 40,58,4,12,0,111,3,11
local $ENV{TZ} = ":/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Europe/London";
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday) = localtime();
print "$sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday\n"'
# Prints 41,58,19,11,0,111,2,10
Unfortunately, the path above is different on different Unixes (/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo on Solaris, /usr/share/zoneinfo on Linux). Since there appear to be no other variations, a slightly portable version would check which of the 2 directories exists and use that - but this obviously only works on Solaris and Linux and may be other unixes. No idea about Windows/MacOS/whatnot.
Valid locations for TZ can be found here: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzref.tzc (but not all of them would necessarily be available on your system - check the above directory).
Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database for more info on TZ database.

Answer 3

You could always store the variation from your timezone in a hash where the key is the timezone and the value is the adjustment from the current time. then when you pass the current time it should return the local time for that zone.