time should do.

update: ah sorry, no help at all... just figured out that you wanted to convert a date! :(

update2:
From the perl faq http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq4.html: How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds?

If it's a regular enough string that it always has the same format, you can split it up and pass the parts to timelocal in the standard Time::Local module. Otherwise, you should look into the Date::Calc and Date::Manip modules from CPAN.

k