And in the process, made my entire post moot, meaning the time I spent trying to be helpful was wasted. The power to edit posts is sometimes important, but you shouldn't be trying to edit history.

Given the complexity of the piping you are doing, I wonder about why you are invoking perl here at all. Perl has powerful internal structures that are intended as stand-ins for the command line utilities, so it would make a lot more sense to grab the entire output from ps and then filter it in Perl:

for (`ps -ef`) {
    my ($user, $pid, $ppid, $c, $stime, $tty, $time, $cmd) = split /\s
++/, $_, 8;
    next unless $user eq 'acuser';
    ...
}
[download]

Of course, the output of ps -ef on my box doesn't have STIME that looks like the date in your command, so you probably want to debug that. You seem to be confusing your various input streams.