Resorting to invoking system commands is hardly ever the way to get stuff done. Perl has a number of built in commands to retrieve the current time. time gets the current 'epoch' from the system. gmtime or localtime may be used to convert the epoch returned by time to a list of date and time elements.

However, date and time is a big industry in the Perl world and there are many modules on CPAN that deal with date and time manipulation. The kitchen sink module is Date::Manip. Watch out under Windows though because you will almost certainly need to initialize the time zone before using any of the module's features (see the 'KNOWN PROBLEMS' section).

Hi

You can use the time function in perl as

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$day,$month,$yr19,@rest) =   localtime(time);#####
+##To get the localtime of your system
print "Date:\t$day-".++$month. "-".($yr19+1900)."\n"; ####To print dat
+e format as expected
print "Time:\t".sprintf("%02d",$hour).":".sprintf("%02d",$min).":".spr
+intf("%02d",$sec)."\n";###To print the current time
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Punitha

print "Time:\t".sprintf("%02d",$hour).":".sprintf("%02d",$min).":".spr
+intf("%02d",$sec)."\n";
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Perhaps you could use printf rather than print and sprintf and avoid concatenation to make that easier to read.

printf qq{Time:\t%02d:%02d:%02d\n}, $hour, $min, $sec;
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I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

If you want a human-readable date/time stamp, then probably the simplest way is to use localtime.

For example:

C:\>perl -le "print scalar localtime"
Wed Jan  2 15:27:20 2008
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Cheers,
Darren :)

As everyone has pointed out, there are much better, more perlish ways to do it, but here my $0.02 in the interest of TIMTOWTDI in case you're in a DOS batch file mindset.

First, date /? reports:

Displays or sets the date.

DATE [/T | date]

Type DATE without parameters to display the current date setting and
a prompt for a new one.  Press ENTER to keep the same date.

If Command Extensions are enabled the DATE command supports
the /T switch which tells the command to just output the
current date, without prompting for a new date.
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If Command Extensions are missing, you can pipe the ENTER like this:
echo.|date

which is a little harder to parse, but also doesn't require setting the date.

C:\chas_sandbox>perl -le "print `date /T`"
Wed 01/02/2008


C:\chas_sandbox>perl -le "print `echo.\|date`"
The current date is: Wed 01/02/2008
Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy)


C:\chas_sandbox>
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---

I humbly seek wisdom.

The problem with this is that the OP was after a date and time stamp, and the DOS date command only gives the date. You could I suppose use a combination of both the date and time commands, but that would be just silly™

Obviously, the OP has a script that was written for a *nix environment and he is trying to port it to winders.