Server Question

[ecchi]

Can anyone who sets up or manages servers help me with this question:

I have a new domain on a new server. When running Perl scripts I cannot get DATE_GMT or DATE_LOCAL to work. Perl requests like: $gmtdate = $ENV{'DATE_GMT'}; and $localdate = $ENV{'DATE_LOCAL'}; return an empty string. When I asked my host about this they said to include the following SSI into my HTML:

<!--#set var="year" value="$DATE_GMT" -->
<!--#set var="year" value="$DATE_LOCAL" -->

This obviously does the job, but I cannot help assuming that the problem is that something is missing or out of date on the server (old version of Perl, old version of server software, or something). Anyone know exactly what the problem is, as my host is good except in one respect: when they make a mistake they fix it but when I ask what the problem was they either lie to cover it up or just don't reply.

If it helps I have the following server info:
SERVER_SOFTWARE = Apache/2.2.6 (Fedora)
SERVER_PROTOCOL = INCLUDED
GATEWAY_INTERFACE = CGI/1.1

Thanks.

[cd34]

Those Environment variables won't always be available in CGI, so, you really cannot depend on them. SSI parses them using the Apache environment which does set those variables.

You could do something like:

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print `date`;
print `date -u`;

date also takes format codes.

print `date "+%b %d, %Y"`;

Its not really the best way to do it because you do fork one process to get the date, but, it does work.

There are also calendar libraries available or you could write something using localtime/gmtime

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                                localtime(time);
printf "%d/%d/%d",$mon+1,$mday,$year+1900;

A much preferred method to forking a call to date. You can replace localtime(time) with localtime(gmtime) for UTC.

Remember that $mon returns 0-11 for Jan-Dec, and the year needs 1900 added to it.