That's because system() doesn't return the program's output; it merely executes a program (and what that program does with its output is its own thing).

You'd want backticks (``) or qx(): chomp(my $date = qx(date +%x_%T)); but there's no need to call the 'date' program when Perl has things to do it for you. See POSIX for the strftime() function:

use POSIX 'strftime';
my $date = strftime "%x_%T", localtime;
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