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.

hi,
yes.This too also i needed. I updated my question too. But how can i append this information to the log file.As of now ,i just replace the 'date' with 'time' and start working in that.
Ok.Shall i do like this,

%usr>(perl test.pl; time perl test.pl;) > test.log
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this is correct ?

-kulls

Honestly, I think you are going about this the wrong way. You really should be looking at something like File::Log

Failing that, you could do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $start = time();

print "Started at ", (strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", localtime($star
+t)), "\n";

for (1 .. 5) {
    print "Logging some stuff...\n";
    sleep 1;
}

my $end = time();

print "Ended at ", (strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", localtime($end)),
+ "\n";

print "Total run time:", $end-$start, " seconds\n";
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Which when run, gives you:

Started at Thu Dec 22 14:59:20 2005
Logging some stuff...
Logging some stuff...
Logging some stuff...
Logging some stuff...
Logging some stuff...
Ended at Thu Dec 22 14:59:25 2005
Total run time:5 seconds
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Then you simply redirect that to your logfile in the same way as you originally did.

There's an important difference. AFAIK 'time' is not a program, but a shell command. It prints to STDERR, so you can't capture it with a plain '>' redirection, but even a '2>' won't do, since you have to capture the output of the whole pipeline:

$ time perl -le 'print "foo"; sleep 1' >/dev/null

real    0m1.017s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.002s
$ time perl -le 'print "foo"; sleep 1' 2>/dev/null
foo

real    0m1.012s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.004s
$ (time perl -le 'print "foo"; sleep 1') >/dev/null

real    0m1.012s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.004s
$ (time perl -le 'print "foo"; sleep 1') 2>/dev/null
foo
$ { time perl -le 'print "foo"; sleep 1'; } 2>/dev/null
foo
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