you need two things, first the parsing of a string into a unix time and then the formating of that time into a string. Some modules undoubtedly will do both but I'm familiar with Date::Parse and Date::Format.

Here's a quick example:

use Date::Parse;
use Date::Format;

my $date = "Dec 11 2003 12:00AM";

my $time = str2time($date);
my $new_date = time2str("%D",$time);
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