printf "%d days, %d hours, %d minutes and %d seconds\n",(gmtime 196364
+)[7,2,1,0];
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I love IOs answer but in the spirit of TIMTOWDI here is how to roll your own. This illustrates one of the uses for the modulus operator:

my $sec = 196364;

print "days  ", int($sec/(24*60*60)),  "\n";
print "hours ", ($sec/(60*60))%24,     "\n";
print "mins  ", ($sec/60)%60,          "\n";
print "secs  ", $sec%60,               "\n";
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You could use Time::Duration. The question was intriguing enough to me to re-invent a wheel for the sake of learning.

Cheers - L~R

If you only need an approximate answer, I'll invoke the "or something like that" clause and change 196364 into '2.3d'

print sec2human(196364), "\n";

sub sec2human {
    my $secs = shift;
    if    ($secs >= 365*24*60*60) { return sprintf '%.1fy', $secs/(365
+*24*60*60) }
    elsif ($secs >=     24*60*60) { return sprintf '%.1fd', $secs/(   
+ 24*60*60) }
    elsif ($secs >=        60*60) { return sprintf '%.1fh', $secs/(   
+    60*60) }
    elsif ($secs >=           60) { return sprintf '%.1fm', $secs/(   
+       60) }
    else                          { return sprintf '%.1fs', $secs     
+           }
}
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Here is a method of going back to seconds from a string like "2 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes and 44 seconds":

sub dhms2sec {
   my $in = shift;
   $in =~ s/(and|,)//g;
   $in =~ s/(\w+)s/\1/g;
   my %y = reverse split(/\s+/,$in);
   return ($y{'second'}) +
          ($y{'minute'} * 60) +
          ($y{'hour'}   * 60*60) +
          ($y{'day'}    * 60*60*24);
}
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The DateTime project has created a DateTime::Duration object, as well as DateTime::Format::Duration.