Yes, I was making the assumption I was getting a umask of 022 (which I find to be true). I just felt that it was odd that running the script as root (with the options of setting permissions by perl's mkdir function) was governed by a different set of rules than on the shell.
It was just odd to me why mkdir can't complete the task while chmod can without setting the umask.
I did not know until now that umask was available in Perl. Thanks a million.