Not saying that what you are currently doing is wrong, but you should check out the POSIX function strftime. This makes it trivial to convert from an epoch time into any time format you like!

use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $epochTime = 965760598;
my $timeStr = strftime "%A, %B %d, %Y - %I:%M%p %Z", localtime($epochT
+ime);
print $timeStr;
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This prints out:
Tuesday, August 08, 2000 - 02:49PM EDT

The % codes for strftime are as follows (from date --help):

  %%   a literal %
  %a   locale's abbreviated weekday name (Sun..Sat)
  %A   locale's full weekday name, variable length (Sunday..Saturday)
  %b   locale's abbreviated month name (Jan..Dec)
  %B   locale's full month name, variable length (January..December)
  %c   locale's date and time (Sat Nov 04 12:02:33 EST 1989)
  %d   day of month (01..31)
  %D   date (mm/dd/yy)
  %e   day of month, blank padded ( 1..31)
  %h   same as %b
  %H   hour (00..23)
  %I   hour (01..12)
  %j   day of year (001..366)
  %k   hour ( 0..23)
  %l   hour ( 1..12)
  %m   month (01..12)
  %M   minute (00..59)
  %n   a newline
  %p   locale's AM or PM
  %r   time, 12-hour (hh:mm:ss [AP]M)
  %s   seconds since 00:00:00, Jan 1, 1970 (a GNU extension)
  %S   second (00..60)
  %t   a horizontal tab
  %T   time, 24-hour (hh:mm:ss)
  %U   week number of year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53)
  %V   week number of year with Monday as first day of week (01..52)
  %w   day of week (0..6);  0 represents Sunday
  %W   week number of year with Monday as first day of week (00..53)
  %x   locale's date representation (mm/dd/yy)
  %X   locale's time representation (%H:%M:%S)
  %y   last two digits of year (00..99)
  %Y   year (1970...)
  %z   RFC-822 style numeric timezone (-0500) (a nonstandard extension
+)
  %Z   time zone (e.g., EDT), or nothing if no time zone is determinab
+le
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