#gmtime EXPR

Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 9-element array with the time localized for the standard Greenwich time zone. Typically used as follows:

    #  0    1    2     3     4    5     6     7     8
    ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
					    gmtime(time);

All array elements are numeric, and come straight out of a struct tm. In particular this means that $mon has the range 0..11 and $wday has the range 0..6 with sunday as day 0. Also, $year is the number of years since 1900, that is, $year is 123 in year 2023, not simply the last two digits of the year. If you assume it is, then you create non-Y2K-compliant programs--and you wouldn't want to do that, would you?

If EXPR is omitted, does gmtime(time()).

In scalar context, returns the ctime(3) value:

$now_string = gmtime;  # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994"

Also see the timegm() function provided by the Time::Local module, and the strftime(3) function available via the POSIX module.

This scalar value is not locale dependent (see perllocale), but is instead a Perl builtin. Also see the Time::Local module, and the strftime(3) and mktime(3) functions available via the POSIX module. To get somewhat similar but locale dependent date strings, set up your locale environment variables appropriately (please see perllocale) and try for example:

use POSIX qw(strftime);
$now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", gmtime;

Note that the %a and %b escapes, which represent the short forms of the day of the week and the month of the year, may not necessarily be three characters wide in all locales.

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