For those who got here (like me) who want to reverse a *string* created by scalar(localtime(time())), the following example shows how to do it:

use Time::Local;
@t = split(/[ :]/,scalar(localtime(time)));
%mon2num = qw(jan 0 feb 1 mar 2 apr 3 may 4 jun 5 jul 6 aug 7 sep 8 oc
+t 9 nov 10 dec 11);
$mon = $mon2num{lc(substr($t[1],0,3))};
print(scalar(localtime(time())),"\n",
      scalar(localtime(timelocal($t[5],$t[4],$t[3],$t[2],$mon,$t[6])))
+,"\n");'
Mon Oct 29 15:59:06 2018
Mon Oct 29 15:59:06 2018
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