in reply to re-syncing these subtitles

I'd recommend Time::Duration and Time::Duration::Parse for this to save effort, assuming you can get it to give you the right output (for example, it interprets strings in the form 'dd:dd' as hh:mm instead of mm:ss, but you can add ':00' to the end to fix that).

Also, I'd probably write the main logic differently:

my $timespec = qr/\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2},\d+/; my ($infile, $offset) = @ARGV; usage() unless defined $offset and $offset =~ /^[+-]?\d+$/; # integer ... if (my ($start, $end) = /^($timespec)\s-->\s($timespec)/) { $_ = time_to_sec($_) += $offset for $start, $end; print "$start --> $end\r\n"; } ...