Re: use of TZ by mktime()/strftime()

[Neil R. Ormos]

Ed Morton wrote:
> Neil R. Ormos wrote:

>> I make an external call to date(1), instead of
>> mktime(), when I can't be sure that the input
>> is well-behaved.  I'm sure it's more expensive
>> then mktime(), but the overhead seems a
>> tolerable price to pay [...]

> Thanks Neil, yeah I've done the same at times
> for small input files but it is an order of
> magnitude slower than using builtin time
> functions so if/when I don't NEED to do that
> then I avoid it. [...]

To put some real-world numbers to this...

Benchmarking my conversion function on a pair of old, slow systems, I get ~600 
and ~900 calls per second.

I can see how the external call approach would be unsuitable for operating on 
larger input files.