While I strongly suggest taking cat2014's advice... The localtime function converts an Epoch date into a list. If you look at the documentation, it has (IIRC) nine elements, of which one is the number of the day of the week ($wday). Which you can then use to extract the day of the week from your own @days = ( Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat) list, using $days[$wday]. Update: Getting your input date into Epoch time without a module like Date::Manip, however, is tricky as all heck and not recommended.