I feel your pain. When I first started, I used to keep snippets of code in files with names like "read-all-filenames", "connect-to-mysql", etc. That way, until I became more familiar with the concepts, I could quickly put my hands on examples.

If you haven't already, see How to RTFM in the Tutorials section. It's a very good read, and the follow-up comments are quite helpful too. I refer to it every so often, because I'm always forgetting something.

As to processing files by date, see Getting and Setting Timestamps in the Cookbook. (My version is out-dated, but if you look in the index under file access -> timestamps, you should be able to find it. It's page 313 in my edition.)

($READTIME, $WRITETIME) = (stat($filename))[8,9];
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Since you apparently are going to have to do without File::Copy, there's no shame in making a system call:

system("copy $oldFile $newFile") == 0 
|| die "$?\n";
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Hang in there, and keep pounding away. The more you use it, the more familiar it'll become.

If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.