My favourite module for the job is Date::Simple, as long as you only have to deal with date, not time. It has a very simple interface, you'll like it.

If you don't want a module, can get rid of the line noise with this trick:

my ($second, $minute, $hour, $dayOfMonth, $month,
    $yearOffset, $dayOfWeek, $dayOfYear, $isDST) = localtime();
$year += 1900; # get absolute year
$month++;      # you'd expect the January to be the first 
               # month, not the 0th ;-)
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