Dealing with dates and times is quite tricky. Have a look at the module suggestions given in the QandASection: dates and times section, e.g. Fast(er) date parsing.

However, if you insist on using Time::Local, you can use this snippet to get started...

use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local qw(timelocal);

sub localdate2epoch {
  my $date = shift;
  # insert some sanity checks and normalisation (whitespace removal, e
+tc.)
  my ($year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec) = split  /[-\s:]+/, $date
+;
  # insert more sanity checks
  # .oO( get the impression here, it's better to use a module ;-)

  $year -= 1900; # correct year  (2011 = 1900 + 111);
  $mon  -= 1;    # correct month (0..11)
  return timelocal( $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year );
}


my $date              = "2011-06-05 11:00:00";
my $now_in_secs       = localdate2epoch $date;
print "In : $date\n";
print "epo: $now_in_secs\n";
print "Out: ", scalar localtime $now_in_secs, "\n";

__END__
In : 2011-06-05 11:00:00
epo: 1307264400
Out: Sun Jun  5 11:00:00 2011
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