Is there a way to then take the system date, convert it into a numerical format like 20061201...?

I've become quite fond of POSIX::strftime for this sort of thing: 

use POSIX;

my $ymdstring = strftime( "%Y%m%d", localtime );

print "looking for log files named *$ymdstring* ...\n";
my @files = <*$ymdstring*>;

print join "\n", @files, "";

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And of course there are plenty of date-related CPAN modules to supplement the standard modules (such as Time::Local and POSIX) that come with perl.

In reply to Re: regular expression for log file date ~ questions and ideas ~ by graff
in thread regular expression for log file date ~ questions and ideas ~ by perl_geoff

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