Is there any commands available in the shell script itself?

This is not how I would choose to do this, but to answer your question directly, you could simply do:

date > test.log ; perl test.pl >> test.log ; date >> test.log
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Note the use of >> rather than >, this ensures that your logfile is appended to rather than overwritten.

You should also check man date for the various formatting options.

Cheers,
Darren :)

To save some typing, you can group the commands together in a subshell and redirect the subshell's output instead.

( date; perl test.pl; date ) > test.log

    --k.

No need to spawn a subshell:

{ date; perl test.pl; date; } > test.log
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will do. At least in bash, that is...

hi,

Thanx for your reply.I'm proceeding with 'time' command instead of 'date'.
-kulls

erm, are you sure this is what you want?

You said that you wanted a timestamp. The time command will certainly not give you that.

From man time

 time - run programs and summarize system resource usage
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An example of what you get when you use time is:

time perl -e 'print "hello world\n"'
hello world

real    0m0.006s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s
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Unless I seriously misunderstood your original question, then I doubt very much this is what you want.

Update: It just occurred to me that you're probably running this on Win32, in which case yes, you could use time. You probably want to add the /T switch.

select STDOUT;
$| = 1;
unless (open STDOUT, "|-") {
    eval {
        while(<>) {
            my $now = DateTime->now;
            print "$now: $_";
        }
    };
    exit(0);
}
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