(edited to fix unclear statement)

Update 2: somehow, I never noticed splitdir

As jellisii2 said, File::Spec can be helpful.

In this case, File::Spec::splitpath would still have given "logfile.txt " because it can't know the extra space is not part of the file name.

Otherwise, File::Spec::splitpath is a good way to break down paths.

The potential negative to File::Spec::splitpath is that it only splits a path into volume, directory-path and filename. If you need to further split the directory path, you have to use a loop:

# this is NOT tested
my ($vol, $dir, $file) = File::Spec::splitpath($path);
my $temp_path = $path;
my $temp_dir;
my $temp_vol;
my @dirs;
while ($dir neq $temp_path)
{
    $temp_path = $dir;
    ($temp_vol, $dir, $temp_dir) = File::Spec::splitpath($temp_path);
    unshift @dirs, $temp_dir;
}
unshift(@dirs, $dir) unless (@dirs > 0);
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