You could use &POSIX::strftime.

use POSIX qw( strftime );
my $datestring = strftime '%m-%d-%Y %H:%M', localtime;
print $datestring, $/;
# prints "01-14-2003 00:06" atm
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Update: Even though it is large, POSIX is cheap to load if you import only the functions you will call. It is part of the core perl distribution, so availability is not a problem with proper perl installations. The strftime(3) *nix man page gives a list of all the format specifiers available.

After Compline,
Zaxo