I may have turned the question around from the usual approach, but I'm
having trouble seeing why my script gives the right answer.

The script reads data that contains dates in the format YYMMDD N, the
N isn't part of the date but is also a digit.

What the script tries to do is read the dates, run them thru
Time::Local to convert to epochal dates.

Then using the random number... create an offset in epochal time that
represents that many days.

   100418 2

  Would get converted to an offset of 2 * 86400... 2 days worth of
  seconds. 

That answer is then subtracted from the epochal time conversion
And then we print the converted date back in YYMMDD format.

In the above case it should be 100416

All that seems to work ok, whats puzzling me is that the function
`localtime' normally spits out the mnths in 0..11 notation, so in
other scripts I've written where something was converted I've has to
to add a little extra math step to make the mnths come out right.

     $mon  += 1;

But in this script, I was all set to do that but discovered the mnths
come out right only if I DON'T do it.

I'm feeding like localtime($var), a calculated epochal time.  But it
appears to be spitting out the mnth element in (1...12) notation.

I'm sure there is some simple explanation but I'm not seeing it.

incoming data might look like the lines below... and the scripts
output follows at the very end.

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

ev   100409 3
  send state tax payment by 15th
ev 100604
  Newsguy account expires 100607
ev 100421 4
  my appt is today

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

The real script is quite a lot longer uses getopts and does more
stuff.  Here I've simplified, shortened and just used <> and fed a
file.

 cat myscript: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local;

my $sec  = 01;
my $min  = 01;
my $hour = 01;

while(<>){
  if( my ($year,$mon,$mday,$predays) = $_ =~ 
m/^ev\s+(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)\s+(\d)\s*$/){
      my ($oyear,$omon,$omday) = ($year,$mon,$mday);
      my $time = timelocal($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year);
        ## calc based on 86400 second in 24 hr
      my $offset = ($time - ($predays * 86400)); 

     ## We turn the offset time back into YYMMDD for comparison
     ($year,$mon,$mday) = (localtime($offset))[5,4,3];
     $year -= 100;  
#     $mon  += 1;
     my $PaddedDateStr = sprintf "%02d%02d%02d", $year,$mon,$mday;
     my $incoming_date = $oyear . $omon . $omday;
     my $str = "\n       Lets see how it works:
  -------        ----=----       -------      
     Incoming year mon day  =  $incoming_date
     predays ($predays) * 86400 
     gives us this 
        offset $offset 
     Which leaves us with   =  $PaddedDateStr
  -------        ----=----       -------
";
    print $str;
   ($year,$mon,$mday,$predays,$oyear,$omon,$omday,$offset,$incoming_date,$str) 
= '';
  }
}  
print "\n";

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

./myscript file

       Lets see how it works:
  -------        ----=----       -------      
     Incoming year mon day  =  100409
     predays (3) * 86400 
     gives us this 
        offset 1273125661 
     Which leaves us with   =  100406
  -------        ----=----       -------

       Lets see how it works:
  -------        ----=----       -------      
     Incoming year mon day  =  100421
     predays (4) * 86400 
     gives us this 
        offset 1274076061 
     Which leaves us with   =  100417
  -------        ----=----       -------


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