That line was exactly what I was looking for. Much elegance! As for affecting the time stamp I'm talking about using it an integer with no separators not a string. It currently returns as..

get_date('timestamp');
20240626204609 
get_date('timestamp', { sep=>':' });
2024:6:26:20:46:9
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I'm not doing any padding in the second case (although I note even the POSIX function pads with spaces by default). I could probably just use the output of time for the first case but it's human readable and happens to be the way I've always used time stamps when typing them by hand.