Just cause I can't resist showing one more way to handle this :)

You can use Date::Parse for this as well. The following snippet shows how to go from your string, to a unix timestamp (using Date::Parse::str2time), and back to your string again (using Date::Format::time2str):

perl -MDate::Format -MDate::Parse -e '
  print time2str("%a %h %e %Y, %r %Z", 
        str2time("Wed Feb 18 2004, 11:03:45 AM EST")), $/;'
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- Cees