Use of uninitialized value in numeric lt (<) at /Date/Manip.pm

This has me puzzled. This code worked on another server, but it's
failing on perl v5.8.8, with Date::Manip loaded from CPAN today.

Warning:
Use of uninitialized value in numeric lt (<) at /home/downside/lib/Date/Manip.pm
line 3327.

at dailyupdate.pl line 13
main::__ANON__('Use of uninitialized value in numeric lt (<) at
/home/downsid...') called at

/home/downside/lib/Date/Manip.pm line 3327
Date::Manip::Date_SecsSince1970GMT(09, 16, 2008, 00, 21, 22) called at
/home/downside/lib/Date/Manip.pm line 1905
Date::Manip::UnixDate('today', '%Y-%m-%d') called at
TICKER/SYMBOLS/updatesymbols.pm line 122
TICKER::SYMBOLS::updatesymbols::getdate() called at
TICKER/SYMBOLS/updatesymbols.pm line 439
TICKER::SYMBOLS::updatesymbols::updatesymbol('DBI::db=HASH(0x87fcc34)',

'TICKER::SYMBOLS::symbol=HASH(0x8a43540)') called at
TICKER/SYMBOLS/updatesymbols.pm line 565

TICKER::SYMBOLS::updatesymbols::updatesymbols('DBI::db=HASH(0x87fcc34)', 1, 0,
-1) called at

dailyupdate.pl line 149
EDGAR::updatesymbols('DBI::db=HASH(0x87fcc34)', 1, 0, -1) called at
dailyupdate.pl line 180
EDGAR::dailyupdate() called at dailyupdate.pl line 193


The code that's failing is simply

sub getdate()
{ my $err; ## today
&Date::Manip::Date_Init('TZ=EST5EDT');
my $today = Date::Manip::UnixDate('today','%Y-%m-%d'); ## today's date
####print "Today is ",$today,"\n"; ## ***TEMP***
return($today);
}

That's right; Date::Manip is failing for "today".

The line in Date::Manip that is failing is

my($tz)=$Cnf{"ConvTZ"};
$tz=$Cnf{"TZ"} if (! $tz);
$tz=$Zone{"n2o"}{lc($tz)} if ($tz !~ /^[+-]\d{4}$/);

my($tzs)=1;
$tzs=-1 if ($tz<0); ### ERROR OCCURS HERE


So Date::Manip is assuming that $Cnf has been initialized with elements "ConvTZ" or "TZ". Those are initialized in Date_Init, so that should have been
taken care of.

It's only failing in my large program. If I just extract "getdate()" above
and run it standalone, there's no error. So there's something about the
global environment that affects this.

This seems to be a known, but un-understood problem. If you search Google for
"Use of uninitialized value date manip" there are about 2400 hits.
This error has been reported with MythTV ("http://www.lemis.com/grog/videorecorder/mythsetup-sep-2006.html";)
and grepmail ("http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Mail/grepmail-4.51.readme";).

John Nagle





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