Perl Date manipulation as is

Today i had to program a little script, in perl, and had to manipulate some dates.  To convert the AM/PM part i used this previously written function (here).

But then i need to do some delta operation on the dates, for whom i new packages like Date::Calc.

The surprise was that i couldn't install new packages in the server, it is a remote server and the less problems one causes, the better... because the server is shared, there was no gcc, bla, bla..

I found this package:
use Date::Manip;

Which seems to be included with Perl.  I couldn't confirm it but it saved the day, here is an example:

my $ffin = &DateCalc("$startdate", "+8 days", \$err);
my ($y, $m, $d) = $ffin =~ m/([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2}).*/g;


More about it:
http://snowhare.com/utilities/perldoc2tree/example/Date/Manip.html