11.3. The localtime Function

When you have a timestamp number (such as the ones from stat), it will typically look something like 1180630098. That won't help you, unless you need to compare two timestamps by subtracting. You may need to convert it to something human-readable, such as a string like "Thu May 31 09:48:18 2007". Perl can do that with the localtime function in a scalar context:

    my $timestamp = 1180630098;
    my $date = localtime $timestamp;