in reply to strange error why is my code showing atime mtime and ctime a month to early

Erm, you are aware that . . . 

perldoc -f localtime

  . . . and $mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indica
+ting
  January and 11 indicating December.

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And consider using POSIX::strftime which is aware of this and handles things in a locale aware manner.

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