Feed it a number of seconds (such as gleaned from time(), and it returns a string in the format of "4 days 1 hour 23 mins 5 secs".
sub duration {
    my $seconds = shift;
    my ($string, $flag);
    my @elements = (
        { label => "years" },
        { label => "days"  },
        { label => "hours" },
        { label => "mins"  },
        { label => "secs"  },
    );
    ( $elements[4]{value}, 
      $elements[3]{value}, 
      $elements[2]{value},
      $elements[0]{value}, 
      $elements[1]{value} ) = (gmtime($seconds))[0..2,5,7];
    $elements[0]{value} -= 70;
    for my $element ( @elements ) {
        my $label = $element->{label};
        $label = substr($label, 0, -1) if $element->{value} == 1;
        $string .= sprintf("%d $label ", $element->{value}, $flag = 1)
            if $element->{value} || $flag;    
    }
    return $string
}

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In reply to Calculate "friendly" duration from # of seconds by EyeOpener

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