Perl gurus, take pity on this newb. I have been writing a script that's purpose is to compare two timestamps and figure out the time delta between them. The difficulty that I am having is with the code to extract the hour from the syslog string. The UNIX command that I would use would be tail -n1 <file> | cut -c8-9. Is there a way to do this with perl? Here is the code that I've come up with so far: 
 open(MSG_FILE, "$syslog_dir/$_/messages");
                @msg_content = <MSG_FILE>;
                close MSG_FILE;

                # Read time of last entry in a file [think tail -n1]
                # and compare to current

                $msg_content[-1] =~ /((\d{1,2})\:(\d{2})\:(\d{2})){1}/
+;
                @timestamp = split(/:/, $1);

[download]
Please let me know where I have gone awry. alas the output has been inconsistent.

In reply to grabbing time from a syslog logfile by mysfitt

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