Keeping it simple, localtime returns the day of the week in list context as the field at index 6:

print [localtime]->[6], "\n";
# Outputs 2 for me, today, because it's Tuesday and weeks start at 0 f
+or Sunday.
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So values of 0 or 6 would represent Sunday and Saturday.

Time::Piece, which comes with Perl, presents an object oriented interface into date/time manipulation:

use Time::Piece;
my $t = localtime;
print join(', ', $t->day_of_week, $t->day, $t->fullday), "\n";
# Outputs 2, Tue, Tuesday
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However, you may also decide that it's a better separation of concerns, leading to more generally useful code if you let the code not care about the day of the week, and set up a crontab entry to do what cron does best.

It might be relevant how your script is run. A script that is aware of temporal concerns seems like code smell to me. A crontab or other scheduling daemon makes it easy to slot for only weekends, for example, leaving the script to only care about what it is supposed to do, not when it is supposed to do it.

I had a perl script which I ran every day for several years. It had to form a URL which included the current date. The format was slightly different on Sunday. It made perfect sense to use localtime to get the date and day-of-week and to use strftime (FUNCTIONS) to format it.
Bill

That's cromulent but, at least from the limited original description, quite different from the OP's problem; a script specifically to write temporal output versus a script only intended (for the time being at least) to run within a temporal window. The second is the sort of thing that is harder to debug and circumvent on demand as well. Taking date args in the invocation would be better than hardcoding the date in all invocations. So I say. :P

Indeed, a script that refuses to do anything during weekends sounds like a lot of fun to maintain in your spare time :-D

-- FloydATC

Time flies when you don't know what you're doing

1. Update, I was wrong, 0 is sunday, source: perldoc
2. Else if you run it on an unix system you can always use a cronjob it might be easier from an administration point of view
3. Added the usual disclaimer at end of post

my $wday = (localtime)[6];
if($wday == 0 || $wday == 6){
#do something
}
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