in reply to stat and a 2GB+ file

You need to have a perl that has "large file" support. Perl 5.6.0 and upwards tries to detect whether your system supports large files, and will enable them (when compiling perl) by default. It might be that you also need 64 bit integer support to be able to report large file sizes, but I'm not sure about that.

You'll need to upgrade your perl.

Abigail