in reply to Getting the date of today as a number (was: Date question)

The simplest way would be to print:
print scalar(localtime(time));

Although you could format it by getting all the elements individually:
@elements = localtime(time);

You can easily find a reference that will tell you what each element is, just remember that months, days of year, other data is 0 based - meaning January is 0, Feb is 1, .. Dec is 11.