Note that something like '2019-08-01' looks like a kind of ISO 8601-ish date, and as such will  lt le eq ne ge gt cmp stringwise compare properly with other such dates — if they have exactly the same format!

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $d1 = '2019-08-01';
 my $d2 = '2019-06-08';
 ;;
 my $comparison = $d1 cmp $d2;
 $comparison = $comparison > 0 ? 'greater than' :
               $comparison < 0 ? 'less than'    :
                                 'equal to';
 ;;
 printf qq{$d1 is %s $d2}, $comparison;
"
2019-08-01 is greater than 2019-06-08
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Of course, no date validation is done!