Something like this for the last if
# This isn't perlish at all but if you need a faithfull emulation...
my $date = `date '+%m%d%y'|sed s/\ /_/g`;
chomp($date);
print "checking the existence of log";
if (-e "/local/home/admin/log${date}_box_50")
{
rename "/local/home/admin/temp_log_copy", "/local/home/admin/log$
+{date}_box_50a"
or die "Failed to rename";
} else {
rename "/local/home/admin/temp_log_copy", "/local/home/admin/log$
+{date}_box_50"
or die "Failed to rename";
}
But really this is horrible! Stop trying to program for shell in perl and learn perl properly! I promise you you'll never look back. In fact whenever I'm writing a shell script now-a-days and I'm thinking about a loop or ...| awk {print $1} or something like that I'll reach for perl!