i wasnt able to get apache::parselog to work

From this comment and your data sample, I have to guess that you aren't using a standard log format, right? Can you show us a sample of your log data and/or the CustomLog directive you use in your Apache configuration? Without that, we can't help you slice and dice it in Perl.

is there a simple way with perl to parse the file and have the ability to pass a file name as an argument?

Yes. Something like the following might work well enough for you depending, of course, on what you haven't told us yet...

#!perl -lan
BEGIN { 
    $SUM = $N = 0; 
    $file = shift; 
} 
if ($F[1] eq $file) { 
    my ($secs) = ($F[2] =~ /^(\d+)/); 
    $SUM += $secs; $N++  
} 

END { 
    print "Average: " , $SUM/ $N;
}
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perl get_stats /manual/misc/perf-tuning.html log.data
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-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";