Shell Programming and Scripting

I found this logging subroutine on the net that I want to use but despite trying many things, I cannot figure out how to get the date in front of the logged text. Ideally what I'm looking for is a line that looks something like this:
Wed Aug 20 18:17:29 PDT 2008 - my logging info here.

my $logging= 1;
if($logging){open FILE , " >> ./my.log";}


sub logit{
if ($logging){
# print FILE system("date");
print FILE "$_[0]\n";
}
}

unless (system "/usr/bin/ssh -l username server hostname > /dev/null") {
logit("remote host available");
} else {
logit("remote host NOT available")
};

Any clues on this?

Thanks,
Gary

replace this:

Code:

print FILE "$_[0]\n";

with:

Code:

print FILE scalar(localtime(time())), "$_[0]\n";

You make that look so easy.