Thanks for your pithy reply, pryrt. I wish my reply could be so concise, but I'm still grabbing at straws. I try to save the vertical space for responders so will put the rest of what I have that pertains between readmore tags:

Thanks for your comment

Okay, since you're asking questions, I'm trying to re-familiarize myself with it; that was all Oct of last year, and I hadn't thought about it since. ...

The isjunc() and is_junction() are effectively two different ways for testing for whether a file is a junction. The isjunc() is a much simpler way of doing it -- it doesn't require spawning to the shell's dir /AL /B, and is (presumably) much more efficient. If you comment out just the f32attr call in my example script, you can see that is_junction (which results in a capital J in the printout) and isjunc (which results in a lower-case j) both trigger on the same files. Basically, with that, I was trying to prove to myself that isjunc really found all the junctions. (I knew that windows dir should, so was comparing it as "golden" to my "experimental" isjunc.) Specific answers to your questions in the readmore...

Read more... (3 kB)

Your recollections and posted code check out. Bravo! I consider this a strong result for untangling a windows 10 machine:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use 5.016;
## File::Find for windows, handling junctions
## https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=11104464
use File::Find;
use Cwd;
## https://metacpan.org/pod/Win32API::File
use Win32API::File qw'GetFileAttributes :FILE_ATTRIBUTE_';
use File::Basename;

my $current = cwd;
my $VERBOSE = 1;

find( \&pm_beneath, $current, );
say "--------------";
find( \&pm_beneath, "C:/Strawberry", );

sub isjunc {
  return GetFileAttributes( $_[0] ) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT;
}

sub pm_beneath {
  if (-d) {    # junctions show up as TRUE for `-d`
    if ( isjunc($File::Find::name) ) {

      # if junction, don't bother creating checking destination direct
+ory existence,
      # and don't try to recurse into it
      $File::Find::prune = 1;
      printf( "[%s] %-12s'%s'\n",
        scalar(localtime), "JUNCTION:", $File::Find::name )
        if ($VERBOSE);
      return;
    }

  }

  my $basename = basename($File::Find::name);
  return unless $basename =~ /\.pm$/;
  print "$File::Find::name\n";
  my $access_age = -A $basename;
  print "    $basename\n";
  printf "access age in days: %.2f\n", $access_age;
}

__END__
[download]

(File::Find) just prints a warning, but otherwise cannot do anything with the junction -- but other than that, it works fine in windows... and even with junctions, it just gives a warning, so it continues to effectively work.

I understand and agree now. The other script I presented in the original post is still ailing:

Read more... (4 kB)

Thanks for comments,