I'm looking to grab the current month and current year to default in a form, but I don't want to create an array. Can I access the localtime elements directly with localtime[0] or is there another method.

In addition to the list slices and list assignments with undef on the LHS, you can also opt to use POSIX::strftime. This also takes the way the need to add 1 to the month and 1900 to the year. As I don't see the point in having separate variables for this, I guess you're building an ISO date in "2005-01" format.

use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $month = strftime "%Y-%m", localtime;
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