If you're doing this just for the sake of the exercise, I guess I'll enourage you. However there are already many many date/time modules that are available to you that have all previously dealt with the problems of parsing datetime strings.

Firstly, a personal preference: I hate seeing all variables declared at the top. Declare them as you use them.

The second thing that strikes me in your code is your declaration of your hash. You don't need to assign any value at all. Something like  my %hash; works perfectly. Or if you prefer:  my %hash = ();. That way you won't have to delete the key later.

Then there's no need to use @old as your <DATA> file handle can work inside the foreach:

foreach $old(<DATA>) { ... }
[download]

Also your cvrt_mon_lcl subroutine would be better as a hash:

my %month_number;
@month_number{qw/Jan Feb Mar Apr May ... Dec/} = (0 .. 11);

print $month_number{Jan};
# 0
[download]

Back to all those modules to select from, I'm a DateTime fan (and developer) so I'll give you my DateTime solution:

use DateTime;
use DateTime::Format::Strptime;

my $parser = DateTime::Format::Strptime->new(
   pattern => '%a %b %d %T EST %Y', # see the docs for the patterns
   locale  => 'en_US', # to get the month and day names to parse
   time_zone => 'America/New_York',
);

my $now = DateTime->now(time_zone => 'America/New_York');
foreach (<DATA>) {
   my ($dt) = $_ =~ /^(.+?)\s:\s/;
   $dt = $parser->parse_datetime($dt); # turn the string into a dateti
+me
   print $_
      if (($dt < $now) 
      and ($dt->add(days => 45) > $now))
}

__DATA__
Fri Dec 3 23:07:21 EST 2004 : Depth is : 234
Sat Dec 4 00:07:29 EST 2004 : Depth is : 123
Sun Dec 5 03:07:32 EST 2004 : Depth is : 144
Tue Feb 8 05:21:18 EST 2005 : Depth is : 11
Sat Feb 26 14:13:12 EST 2005 : Depth is : 4567
Fri Mar 11 17:09:38 EST 2005 : Depth is : 265
Sat Mar 12 07:07:27 EST 2005 : Depth is : 1654
Sat Mar 26 07:07:27 EST 2005 : Depth is : 1654
[download]

Some notes:

1. The pattern could use %Z instead of 'EST' in which case it wouldn't need to specifically declare the time zone. However 'EST' is an ambiguous zone and so we can't use it.
2. We add 45 days to the datetime and then check if it's greater than now rather than just subtracting it from now and checking that the difference is over 45 days because of the problems inherrent with date math ('daylight savings'/leap years/seconds etc.)
3. I also check that it isn't a future date, but if this is log parsing that shouldn't be a problem
4. If you only need day precision see the 'truncate' method in the DateTime documentation.
5. DateTime is the only set of modules that properly handle time zones and daylight savings (as well as handling international locales).

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.