I'm a big fan of PHP's strtotime() so I wanted that same functionality in Perl. If you have a date/time string and need a unixtime, then strtotime() is the way to go.

I just released the first public version of Date::Parse::Modern, which is a modern replacement for Date::Parse. Not only does it support more formats than Date::Parse, it's also significantly faster.

In a perfect world this functionality (strtotime) should be in Time::Piece. It's very common in my work flow to read a log file and need to parse the date/time part of the line to a Unixtime.