Ouch. OP did ask for AM/PM, but I simply replied to trammell's post and didn't notice that part.

I'm a newbie to Perl (about 3 months) so I don't know how long you may have been able to do that with localtime. I presume for as long as localtime has been around.

scalar has been around for a fair while. Scalar and List context are fairly fundamental to Perl.