update: sorry ikegami, somehow I completely overlooked your post ;)

Personally, I like DateTime for all date functions. It is extremely flexible

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use DateTime;

my $date = DateTime->now();

print $date->ymd() . "\n";

$date->subtract( days => 3);

print $date->ymd() . "\n";
[download]

Steve