In Perl a function called timelocal exists to convert times to epoch.
example: my $epoch = timelocal($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year)
This function however appears to be inherently flawed when dealing with times very far in the past (before the year 999) - see the section on Year Value Interpretation. To make things worse, the way it processes 2 digit years complicates things even more...
Given a time before the year 999 how can I accurately convert it to its corresponding epoch value?