The $month value('Mar'} seems to vanish within the if statement and only in the if statement. What's going on here?

If you want to figure it out your existing program use Basic debugging checklist

Otherwise see split, http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html#Parentheses-for-capturing and http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html#Extracting-matches

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;
my $now = localtime;
dd( $now );
my( $weekday, $month, $monthday, $time, $year ) = split ' ', $now;
dd( ( $weekday, $month, $monthday, $time, $year )  );
__END__
"Mon Mar  9 20:38:38 2015"
("Mon", "Mar", 9, "20:38:38", 2015)
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