[rt-users] Weird hardcore scrip question regarding POSIX, strftime(), localtime()

[Rick Russell]

Hi all. I'm writing a custom scrip that performs some "business time"
calculations on tickets, with the idea of determining SLA compliance.

The business details are boring, but I've got a weird technical problem.

I'm using Jesse Vincent's most excellent Business::Hours module to perform
the calculation that I want. It works fine. When it's done, I've got a time
in UNIX epoch seconds.

Here is where things go weird. I want to convert the UNIX epoch seconds into
a string, along these lines:

  MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss AM|PM TZ

No problem, I'll just use the POSIX package and the good old strftime
function. Let's say the UNIX epoch seconds are stored in $MySeconds, then
I've got code like this:

  my $TimeString = strftime('%m/%d/%Y %r %Z',localtime($MySeconds));

The problem is, about 5% of the time, this scrip fails, and the RT error log
shows:

[Tue Jan 31 00:10:58 2006] [error]: Scrip 339 Commit failed: Usage:
POSIX::strftime(fmt, sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = -1, yday = -1,
isdst = -1) at (eval 33876) line 50.

So, I figure, strftime just got bad data. So I use $RT::Logger->error to
send $MySeconds and localtime($MySeconds) to the error log.

My epoch seconds are good, but the output of localtime($MySeconds) seems to
vary, even when supplied with the same input data. Sometimes posting
localtime($MySeconds) to the error log results in a string posted to the
error log, like

Thu Jan 19 08:00:00 2006

Other times, it results in an ARRAY:

Time::tm=ARRAY(0xde1a0f0)

In the first case, I always get a good string out of strftime. In the second
case, I always get the POSIX::strftime error and the scrip execution fails.

Ideas? I'm thinking that PERL is calling different versions of localtime().
Maybe. How would I find out?

I'm also mystified why this code works literally 95 times out of 100, but
fails every once in awhile.

Rick R.

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Rick Russell
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Rice University
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