If you call localtime in list context, it returns an array; what you want are the fourth through sixth elements of that array. A really terse way to nab these three parts is with the following (which uses an array slice):

my ($day, $month, $year) = (localtime)[3..5];
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The first element of the resulting array (the fourth element returned by localtime is the day, the second is the month (numbered from 0-11) and the third is the number of years since 1900.

$year +=1900;
my $datestr = join "-", ++$month, $day, $year;
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That will get you most of the way (neither month, nor day is guaranteed to be two digits, but there are lots of ways to 'pad' out the strings.)

You can also get a nice timestamp by calling localtime in a scalar context, which can be forced using the scalar operator (e.g. my $timestamp = scalar localtime;.)

All this and more is documented in the localtime manpage ...

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

Please don't. mm-dd-yyyy is probably not going to be easily understood outside of the United States of America (where dd-mm-yyyy is much more common). However, yyyy-mm-dd

• is understood around the world (even in the USA, people know what you mean right away)
• has been formally standardized internationally
• leads to trivial sorting by date

I understand your concern. However, it is only going to be used within the US.

Are you ever going to sort it?

Are you ever going to have someone who (like me) grew up in a different country using it?

Sometimes you have to do what the customer wants, but I strongly second tye's advice. Even if you think this will only be used in the US, if you can you want to use YYYY-MM-DD format.

There are parts of the US in which d/m/y is more common, as well. In Florida, in particular, (although I'd expect Texas, Arizona, California, Lousiana, and probably Vermont and the Dakotas, if my ethnic stereotyping classes were correct) this is a constant problem. If M/D/Y were so popular, the IRS wouldn't have to print "month" and "day" on their forms.

Besides which, almost all US institutions of any size -- federal government, military, large corporations, hospitals, &c. -- universally use y/m/d for their short form. It's even becoming standard on movie posters, and I've seen more than one 2001 wall calendar printed that way.

IMHO, the only place in which it isn't just plain rude to use M/D/Y is if it's plainly labelled as such, or when the month (or possibly even the day) are written out: eg. January 01, 2001, or January the First, 2001.

Easiest way is probably to use localtime in conjunction with POSIX::strftime as I've just demonstrated here.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

And to my incredible surprise, the ActiveState Perl port supports Perl's POSIX module even on Windows! It says here that:

SUPPORTED PLATFORMS

• Linux
• Solaris
• Windows

#!/usr/bin/perl
# file name here
use warnings;
use strict;

my @timelist = localtime;
$timelist[4] = $timelist[4]+1;
$timelist[5] = $timelist[5]+1900;
my $target = $timelist[4]."-".$timelist[3]."-".$timelist[5];

print $target, "\n";
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Maybe it's a cannon to kill a fly (or has some problems I don't know about), but I've always used the pure-perl Date::Format module without any problems. The following should print out the recommended yyyy-mm-dd format:

use Date::Format;
print time2str( '%Y-%m-%e', time );
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or from the command-line:

perl -MDate::Format -e 'print time2str( "%Y-%m-%e", time )'
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Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode

Just my 0.2 XP's worth:

sub date {
        my($sec,$min,$h,$mday,$month,$year) = localtime(time);
        $year  += 1900;   # 2-digit year (eg. 101 = 2001)
        $month += 1;      # month is counted from 0

        return sprintf "%02d-%02d-%04d", $month, $mday, $year;
}
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PS: if your audience is international: don't use that format. I'm from Austria, I'm used to interpreting xx-xx-xxxx as DD-MM-YYYY. You might want to use YYYY-MM-DD instead, to avoid this confusion.

--
Brigitte    'I never met a chocolate I didnt like'    Jellinek
http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/         http://perlwelt.horus.at