Creating unix times from datetime stamps

Scenario: you want to convert "2008-08-02 12:45:01" to the unix epoch time:

use Time::Local qw/timegm/;

my $dt = "2008-08-02 12:45:01";
my @datetime  = split /\-|:|\s/, $dt;
$datetime[1]--; # months need decrementing
my $epoch_time = timegm(reverse @datetime);