If you want to use a regex like Oct 10 05:5[0-2]:, then I'd say you don't need "start" and "end" values, because the desired range from start to end is fully expressed in that one regex.

If the intent of your example is to catch everything between "Oct 10 05:50:00" and "Oct 10 05:52:59" inclusive, then a logical two-arg, start/end spec would look like this (which would be pretty simple for any naive user to understand):

script.pl --start 'Oct 10 05:50 --end 'Oct 10 05:52'
[download]

(Including specific seconds values in the start and/or end options would also be simple.)

Depending on what kind of data the script is going to do its "binary search" over, it might be more sensible to use one of the Date:: modules, to interpret both the user's ARGV values and the date values in the data being searched - i.e. something like:

my $user_start_date = get_secs_from_opt( $opt{start} );
my $user_end_date = get_secs_from_opt( $opt{end} );

for my $record ( @data_records ) {
    my $rec_date = get_secs_from_data( $record );
    if ( $rec_date >= $user_start_date and $rec_date <= $user_end_date
+ ) {
        # do something with a hit...
    }
}
[download]

The "get_secs_from_*" functions would just invoke some suitable Date:: module to return "unix_time" (or whatever term is used for "seconds since the epoch" in the chosen module).

But then, I'm not sure what you mean by "binary search", so maybe this isn't helpful.

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