Just in case you're too lazy to split up your date string into something that Time::Local can handle, and don't mind slurping in 240k of Perl code, you could also use the module Date::Manip

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Date::Manip qw(UnixDate);

my $time_new = 'Tue Feb 13 19:04:04 IST 2007';

my $time = UnixDate($time_new, "%s");

print "secs since the Epoch: $time\n";  # prints 1171373644
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