print scalar localtime;
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"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

scalar localtime misses the time zone that appears in the OP's example. I'd use strftime to get it exact.

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime, "\n"'
Sun Sep 22 13:01:42 2002
$ perl '-MPOSIX qw(strftime)' -e 'print strftime( "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y",
+ localtime ), "\n"'
Sun Sep 22 13:01:48 PDT 2002
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_______________
DamnDirtyApe

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who
would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
            --Friedrich Nietzsche

For quick & dirty scripts, the following will suffice:

   print `/usr/bin/date`;
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What, if any, safety considerations are there in going with the simple backtick solution?
Are we afraid of a Trojanned date program?

What other security risks might we encounter here?

--
Microsoft delendum est.

The biggest security concern with print `date` is not that system's date binary has been trojaned. If that were the case, you're already screwed. I'd be more concerned that combined with some sort of path munging, an entirely different file named date could be executed. If it used an absolute path name, I dont think there would be much of a security concern at all. i.e. print `/bin/date` would be a step in the right direction.

From a coding standpoint, shelling out trivial things like this is a performance hit, and I'd flag it in any program that wasn't a throwaway. Of course, virtualsue, only advocated it for use in quick 'n dirty stuff anyway.

-Blake