See the current Perl documentation for lstat.
Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:
lstat - stat a symbolic link
lstat FILEHANDLE
lstat EXPR
lstat
Does the same thing as the stat() function (including setting the special _ filehandle) but stats a symbolic link instead of the file the symbolic link
points to. If symbolic links are unimplemented on your system, a normal stat() is done.
If
EXPR is omitted, stats $_.