I didn't realize until investigating this thread that the scalar return of localtime is a built-in and is not locale dependent. I figured it was like UNIX ctime so I cringed at some of the scalar solutions since I thought they'd break if the default time locale setting changed. But I was wrong.

Before realizing this, my first choice would have been to use the POSIX strftime method as proposed by Abigail-II. Another way is this:

$mon = (qw/jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec/)[(localtim
+e)[4]];
print "$mon\n";
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