The localtime function can be used to return a formatted date time. Here is a basic example of how to use localtime.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $datetime = localtime;

print "$datetime \n";

Running this script should return something like this.

Tue Nov 23 23:51:34 2021

Dumper and Time::Piece can be used to visualize the localtime object.

use Data::Dumper;
use Time::Piece;
print Dumper $datetime;

Which should return something like this.

$VAR1 = bless( [
                 34,         # seconds
                 51,         # minutes
                 23,         # hour
                 23,         # day of the month
                 10,         # month where 0 is January and 11 is December
                 '121',      # year
                 2,          # day of the week
                 326,        # day of the year
                 0,          # 0 means daylight savings is in effect, 1 means not in effect
                 1637733094, # number of seconds that have elapsed since 12/31/1969
                 1
               ], 'Time::Piece' );

Let say you only want to print the current month or year. This can be accomplished by including the POSIX module with strftime.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use POSIX qw(strftime);
use strict;
use warnings;

my $year = strftime "%Y", localtime;

print "$year \n";