NAME

TimeFormat_Minute - Get current time to the nearest minute.

DESCRIPTION

This module is used for testing the current-time featues of Time::Format; that is, the use of the function time_format and the tied hash %time without a time argument.

These are difficult to test because of a race condition. Consider the following test:

my ($sec, $min, $hr) = localtime;
my $now = sprintf '%02d:%02d:%02d', $hr, $min, $sec;
is time_Format('hh:mm:ss'), $now       => 'Test formatting of current time';

If the first statement occurs just before a second boundary (e.g. 08:34:09.995), and the third statement occurs just after that boundary (08:34:10.014), the test will fail even if nothing is wrong.

The (imperfect) solution in this module is to ignore seconds and focus only on chunks of time that are minute-sized or larger. First call c<tf_minute_sync>. That will sleep for three seconds if the current time is within two seconds of a minute boundary. Then do your test-- but don't test any seconds values, because the race condition still applies.

This module also supplies a function, tf_cur_minute to return the current time (as determined by localtime) as a string of the form "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM".