Thank you Almut for the code and everyone else for your assistance. I worked on it and it works good. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Date::Manip;
Date_Init("TZ=EST"); #
{
my $input =$ARGV[0]; #returns filename from command line
my $date_anyTZ; 

chomp $input; #strip the carriage return
      
    
open (DATAFILE, "$input")|| die ("Can not open $input:!\n");
                             #access the file
      
    while (my $date_anyTZ=<DATAFILE>)
        {
            chomp $date_anyTZ;   
             # get rid of '~' to make date parseable by Date::Manip
            $date_anyTZ =~ tr/~/ /;
            my $date_EST = UnixDate(ParseDate($date_anyTZ), 
                             "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z");
            printf "%-24s -->  %s\n", $date_anyTZ, $date_EST;
        }
close (DATAFILE);
}
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