The doc on stat says that those times are the number of seconds since epoch..(also defined in the doc on stat). I would reccomend using Date::Calc if you really want a good human readable date. However, you can simply use the highest number returned in  $mtime if you're looking for the most recently modified file. I don't see stat giving you the create time however (I've never used stat, but just from a brief perusal of the docco on it). Good luck!