There are a few ways to do this in perl. It's a good day to learn about array slices and s/printf.

# this takes the 4th through sixth elements of the array
# returned by localtime and sets @times to them
my @times = (localtime)[3..5];
my $date = sprintf("%4d%02d%02d", $times[2]+1900, $times[1]+1, $times[
+0]);
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The "%02d" formatting string (roughly: give me two digits, add enough '0's to the front to make the field two wide) is highly useful for 0-padding things to a specified length (in this case, 2).

Overall, it's more typing than the external call to date? Sure, but it's more portable and (although I haven't benchmarked it), more efficient (doesn't spawn a subshell).

HTH.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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