That looks like Date::Manip. I'm not familiar with that module and the docs aren't straightforward, so I'm going to give an answer using the module I use: DateTime.

my $dt = DateTime->today->subtract( days => 3 );
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I used like this in my one of the script

#!/usr/bin/perl
sub _timestamp
{

    my $diff    = shift;


    my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday) = localtime(time - $di
+ff);

$mon++;

    return sprintf("%d-%02d-%02d",($year + 1900),$mon,$mday);
}

$pre=259200;  # 24*60*3
$myTimeStamp = _timestamp ($pre);

print "$myTimeStamp \n";
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bharat

Aside from

$pre=24*60*60*3;
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being much clearer than

$pre=259200;  # 24*60*3
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not every day has 24*60*60 seconds. Your code is buggy.

Date::Manip, though I don't think this is really the way to go. DateTime is much more flexible and is quite good at date math.

perl -MDate::Manip -le 'print UnixDate(ParseDate("3 days ago"), "%A")'
# Friday
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$  perl -MDate::Simple=:all -wE 'say today() - 3'
2010-06-12
$
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update: sorry ikegami, somehow I completely overlooked your post ;)

Personally, I like DateTime for all date functions. It is extremely flexible

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use DateTime;

my $date = DateTime->now();

print $date->ymd() . "\n";

$date->subtract( days => 3);

print $date->ymd() . "\n";
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use strict;
use warnings;


my $current = `date`;                                                 
+                     
print "Current date and time is $current";

print `date -d "1 day ago"`;
print `date -d "1 week ago"`;
print `date -d "1 month ago"`;
print `date -d "1 year ago"`;
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Running a shell so many times sounds expensive and not portable.