just one nit to pick...
in your example above,
print <<IMPLIED;
$foo
IMPLIED;
you have a semi-colon after the string terminator. this won't compile on my ActiveState Perl build 623, with or without strict and warnings. i've only been using Perl since 5.005_03, so i'm not sure if this is a holdover from earlier versions, or a bug. otherwise, your example is accurate, for *NIX. on Win32 of course, the `date` call waits for user input, and outputs something like
The current date is: Thu 06/21/2001
Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy) date
when enter is pressed. yuck.
~Particle