Perl script to convert logged datetimes to UNIX epoch timestamps

Question

I have a log file (datetimes.log) consisting of hundreds of thousands of timestamps of the form:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss

For example:

2013-03-28 06:43:51
2013-03-28 06:43:55
2013-03-28 06:44:03
...etc.

I'd like to write a simple Perl script to output a new unix_timestamps.log file that contains the same entries, but instead of the datetime, to have the corresponding UNIX epoch timestamp. For the example above, the unix_timestamps.log file would have the following info in it:

1364453031
1364453035
1364453043
...etc.

The only thing I can think of is perl convert_2_timestamps.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

grep m/_(\d{4})(\d\d)(\d\d)/ | POSIX::mktime(?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?) > unix_timestamps.log

But not sure how to transfer the parameters into mktime, and not sure if this is even the right approach. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime::Format::Strptime;


my $parser = DateTime::Format::Strptime->new(
  pattern => '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',
  on_error => 'croak',
);

while( <DATA> ) {
   my $dt = $parser->parse_datetime($_);
   print $dt->epoch, "\n";
}

__DATA__
2013-03-28 06:43:51
2013-03-28 06:43:55
2013-03-28 06:44:03