I'm trying to find the difference in seconds between two dates. The two (and only two) dates come as standard out like: 
Sun 09 30 06 42 36 2007
Tue 10 02 06 01 55 2007

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(Note: the months correspond to September and October respectively.)

I tried to do this with awk because I use awk in plenty of other places but awk's mktime() is a GNU-only addition it seems and I only have access to barebones Solaris installs. The only alternative remaining I think is Perl's timelocal function in Time::Local which I believe is a part of the standard install, right? My goal is to put a Perl one-liner in a sh script and this is the last piece in the pipe. I've already written a Perl script which works but purely as an exercise for the monkish community, where are the improvements I'm missing?

Here's what I have currently but I am actively working on it though: 
my @array;
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    my @fields = split;
    shift @fields;
    unshift(@fields, pop(@fields));
    $fields[1]--; # decrement the month, timelocal is zero-based
    push (@array, timelocal (reverse @fields));
}

print $array[1] - $array[0];

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"The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why." -- `man perl`

In reply to Diff'ing dates (solved) by LighthouseJ

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