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