Any reason not to use localtime to get the system date ?

There is also a Time::localtime which you can use.

($day, $month, $year) = (localtime)[ 3, 4, 5 ];
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The problem with what you are trying to do is that you need to use backticks or the qx operator if you want to trap the output of the command. The 0 you see in the text file is the return value from system, which is giving you the status of the call and not what the call wrote to its standard output.

$date = `Date /T`;
print FILENAME $date;
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<cite>Just a tongue-tied, twisted, earth-bound misfit. -- Pink Floyd</cite>

Aack! Stuff like this is fraught with peril. Don't do it!

What if the user had a valuable file of the same name in that directory that you just clobbered? What if you don't have permission to write in the directory? What if someone in a different timezone has mounted the drive remotely and runs at the same time as you do? What if any of a number of ugly things happen between the time you write it and the time you read it?

This creates a maintenance headache way out of proportion to the problem you're trying to solve. Polluting a directory to get the date is completely unnecessary, and is an accident just waiting to happen.

But now let me tell you how I really feel ;-)

You're right of course about redirecting the output. But, sorry to nitpick, this isn't DOS exactly - it's the WinNT shell. DOS, as seen on Windows9x/3x/MS-DOS won't take the switch /t after the date command.