I sort of golfed this down to the following ( I added a bit of whitespace here to make it more reable, but i get 100 chars for the block part of the sub :-)

use File::Path;
use warnings::register;

sub umask_mkpath {
   my@c;
   umask((umask(shift),@c=eval{mkpath(@_)} 
     or warnings::warnif "Err:$@")[0]);
   @c
}
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I omitted the string to numeric conversion you were doing with oct(), because I felt the caller was more likely to know if this was needed or not, and I added the ability it set the umask (the first argument). Otherwise this should behave like mkpath(), expect that if it returns false, the error message will be in $@.

Incidentally I did this mostly because your code reminded me of a trick i'd seen before that avoids using a temporary variable when setting an attribute on a different filehandle without changing the currently selected one.

select((select(STDERR),$|++)[0]); # autoflush STDERR
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And I thought I might try to apply the idiom here. Anyway. :-)

---
demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}