hi eye, thanks for replying with this. i have tried a number of solutions here and yours seems the most likely. fixing up $hour and $min so it is in a format that doesnt make Parsedate return undef still produces an issue at 00:00:00. i have a problem tho, what is this code doing exactly and why does it work? 
my $now = time;
$now -= ($now % 60);

[download]
and also would it work if i wanted to run my code every 5minutes with similar data, as opposed to 30minutes? thanks for your input and sorry to be a pain.
conal.

In reply to Re^2: Time::ParseDate issues by Conal
in thread Time::ParseDate issues by Conal

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