This puts all of perl into the C locale, which would mean error messages
from perl would be in English rather than the user's language. It
probably isn't a big deal, because that snippet of perl is short and not
likely to produce problems, but I wonder how hard it would be to set the
locale just for the strftime call.
Maybe just setting LC_TIME to C would do ...
From locale(7) man page:
LC_TIME
changes the behavior of the strftime(3) function to
display the current time in a locally acceptable form; for
example, most of Europe uses a 24-hour clock versus the
12-hour clock used in the United States.