in reply to Matching dot using regexp

The dot has special meaning in regexes. you must escape it:  /\./

See perlrequick for character that must be escaped:

Not all characters can be used as is in a match. Some characters, called metacharacters, are reserved for use in regex notation. The metacharacters are

{}[]()^$.|*+?\

Then if you add a newline to your first print statement print "new time is $tim\n"; or use say the whole output will be clearer.

update please note that you are splitting on any character, resulting in an empty list:

perl -MData::Dump -e "dd split /./, $ARGV[0]" assasas ()

Note also that you can split on an alternation /\.|:/ , avoiding the first regex:

perl -MData::Dump -e "dd split /\.|:/, $ARGV[0]" 10:A.11:B.12 (10, "A", 11, "B", 12)
L*

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