thanks dws, BUU and theorbtwo. That did the trick and strftime enabled me to remove that huge series of ifs as well.

cheers, -semio

posting the updated code for comparison purposes.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Text::ParseWords; 
use POSIX qw(strftime);

use strict;

my $log = "pixlog";
my $looptime = 300;
my $maxsize = 1000;

my (@lines, @fields, @devices, @duoutput);
my ($devices, $device, $item, $x);

while (1) {

my $newlog = strftime "%d%m%Y%H%M%S.fakepix.lgz", localtime;

open (LOGFILE, "< $log") || die "Could not open file: $! \n";
@lines = <LOGFILE>;
close (LOGFILE);

open (NEWLOG, ">$newlog");

foreach $item (@lines) {
@fields = quotewords(' ',0,$item);

my $month = strftime "%b", localtime;
my $time1 = strftime "%H:%M:%S", localtime;
my $time2 = strftime "%H:%M:%S:", localtime;
my $date = strftime "%d", localtime;
my $year = strftime "%Y", localtime;

if ($fields[7] =~ (m/:\d+\d+:\d+\d+:/)) {
   $fields[0] = $month;
   $fields[1] = $date;
   $fields[2] = $time1;
   $fields[4] = $month;
   $fields[5] = $date;
   $fields[6] = $year;
   $fields[7] = $time2;
}
else {
   $fields[0] = $month;
   $fields[1] = $date;
   $fields[2] = $time1;
}
for ($x=0; $x <= $#fields; $x++) {
if ($x eq $#fields) 
{
print NEWLOG "$fields[$x]";
}
else
{
print NEWLOG "$fields[$x]";
print NEWLOG " ";
}
}
}

close (NEWLOG);

sleep($looptime)
}
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