What use are you putting the result to?

What I'm doing is simulating a browser transaction and one of the required parameters is epoch time in milliseconds. I don't actually need the result to be millisecond accurate. I just need to pass a 13-digit number with no decimals as one of the parameters in the request. While millisecond accuracy would be nice, all I really need is for the number to be the right number of digits and for the value to be accurate to within a minute or two.

Why not use the scalar context floating point result instead of a nasty string concatenation that will fail in nasty ways about 1/10th of the time?

Ah! I think I get it:

use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday);

my $timestamp = int (gettimeofday * 1000);
print STDOUT "timestamp = $timestamp\n";
exit;

Output: 

timestamp = 1227593060768

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