There's about four different ways to answer you, and you'll probably get all four within the next 20 minutes.

"How do you split on multiple spaces":

 
my ($day, $month, $daynum, $time, $zone, $year) = split /\s+/, `date`;
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However, that doesn't go far enough, since you don't actually need to fork here:

my ($day, $month, $daynum, $time, $zone, $year) = split /\s+/, localti
+me;
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However what you probably want to do instead is just take the list output of localtime:

my @now = localtime;
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Which is already split up nicely. See the docs for details.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker