You have to call it twice, or generate your own scalar version from the list output. What happens is, if you call localtime in a string context, perl knows this and localtime generates a string, whereas if you call it in list context, you get the raw list output. There is a module called Timelocal that lets you convert a date to seconds since the Epoch, but really the best thing to do probably is to store the output of time() for the time you want, and then feed it through localtime like so

$str = localtime($storedtime);
@date = localtime($storedtime);
[download]

                - Ant