You can format your output, as another poster noted, with printf or sprintf; The code below does that. To find the difference between dates, you can use module Time::Local and it's function, timelocal(). 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local;

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                                localtime(time);

printf("Today's date is: %02d.%02d.%02d\n", 
                       $mon+1, $mday, $year % 100);

my $date = "12.25.03";
my ($m,$d,$y) = split /\./, $date;

my $xmas_time = timelocal(0,0,0,$d,$m-1,$y);
my $today = time;
my $days_diff = int( ($today - $xmas_time) / (24*60*60) );

print "Difference is $days_diff days\n";

[download]
Chris

In reply to Re: Calculating between times by Anonymous Monk
in thread Calculating between times by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.