I'm fond of Date::Calc, so I played with your example a bit since I had never used it that way myself. I found something that seemed curious to me. Your example has the delta as negative, since @date_one is before @date_two. That makes sense. But Date::Calc seems to cause each and every element returned by Delta_DHMS to be negative. Should just the first element be negative?

[chicks]$ perl x
-33:-7:-47:-19
33:7:47:19
[chicks]$ cat x
#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use Date::Calc qw/Delta_DHMS/;


my @date_one = qw/2002 04 25 23 12 40/;
my @date_two = qw/2002 03 23 15 25 21/;

my ($dd, $dh, $dm, $ds) = Delta_DHMS(@date_one, @date_two);
print "$dd:$dh:$dm:$ds\n";

($dd, $dh, $dm, $ds) = Delta_DHMS(@date_two, @date_one);
print "$dd:$dh:$dm:$ds\n";
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