As good monk belg4mit said, localtime is likely may be what you're looking for. The local perldoc is your friend, as is the PerlMonks search form at the upper left.   But to get you started, try QandASection: dates and times, which contains several examples that may help.

Update: Depending on what you're going to do with your human-readable date/timestamp, printf (print a formatted string) and sprintf (return a formatted string) may also be worth delving into.