> BTW, if we speak about this example, of course you may use something > like the following starting with perl 5.004: > > my (undef, undef, undef, undef, $mday, $mon) = localtime(); Kind of off-topic, can't you use something like this: my ($mday, $mon) = (localtime())[4 .. 5]; # ? I'll check later. --Yuval