Another way to format time is to use POSIX strftime:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $today = strftime "%a %m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime;
print $today, "\n";
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I ran it, and it returned:

Thu 03/31/2011 23:45:52
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