Clever timestamps but is it a good idea?

At work I have a collection of long-running Perl programs exec-ed by a rc script that have their noise redirected to a single intermingled log. The scripts themselves and the modules they use are littered with carps, warns and print STDERRs depending upon when and by whom they were written. I can differentiate their output (more or less) but I’d like it timestamped for forensic purposes.

My first thought, heaven help me, involving tying filehandles is exampled by this hack:

!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use Tie::Handle;
use Carp;
use strict;

package TimeStamper;
@ISA = qw(Tie::Handle);

sub wrap {
my $fh = shift;
my $fh_name = $fh;
$fh_name =~ s/^*//;
local *MYFH;
open(MYFH, “>&$fh_name”) or die(“Failed to dupe [$fh_name]: $!”);
tie($fh,‘TimeStamper’,*MYFH);
}

sub TIEHANDLE {
my ($class,$fh) = @_;
my $obj = bless [$fh],$class;
return $obj;
}

sub PRINT {
my $self = shift;
my $fh = $self->[0];
my t = localtime(); print sprintf("[%4d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d:%02d] ", $t[5]+1900,t[4,3,2,1,0]),@_;
}

package main;

TimeStamper::wrap(*STDERR);
print STDERR “This is timestamped.n”;
warn(‘This is timestamped.’);
carp(‘This is timestamped.’);
print “This is not timestamped.n”;

Neat. Even half clever. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea.