Both of the previous answers require perl 5 (and I encourage you to install perl 5, btw).

But for a perl 4 answer you need to look at the time() function (which returns seconds since the epoch), and the localtime() function (which returns an array of items). Basic usage would look something like this:

$secs = time();
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                     localtime($secs);
$year += 1900;
@mname = ('Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul'
          'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec');
printf("%2.2d-%3s-%4d", $mday, $mname[$mon], $year);
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Michael