It sounds as if you need some particular output format for dates and times. See &POSIX::strftime for perl usage and 'man 3 strftime' for details of the formats available to this very handy time & date formatting function.

The best part is that you never need to parse the output of localtime. &POSIX::strftime takes the same time structure that localtime produces, so localtime can be used as a singlethe second argument for strftime.

After Compline,
Zaxo