I think what you may have been after is:

#!/perl/bin/perl.exe -w

$date = "20021122";

($year, $month, $day) = $date =~ m/(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/;

print "YEAR $year\n";
print "MONTH $month\n";
print "DAY $day\n";
[download]

This will get out the information you want. However I don't quite follow why you have the $ at the end to anchor your string if you've only got that info in there. The regex I've given you will fail if you have non digits in the string, so you should be okay. If you just slurp the rest of the string in to your match, you may or may not get numbers depending on what your data looks like.

Hope that helps!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.