Thanks for your help - your node seems pretty comprehensive and I'll have a shot at it.
I also tried snadra's idea which works fine on my NT4 system but doesn't work fine on Win2k. Any idea why ? Here's my bit of code...

####################### PRAGMA #######################
use strict;

####################### IMPORT ####################### 
use file::stat;

my $file = "d:\\brossad\\"; # your own folder name here
my @info = stat($file);
my $last_access =  $info[8];
my $last_modification = $info[9];

if (@info)
{
   #print $last_access."\n";
   my @time = (localtime($last_access));
   $time[4]++;
   $time[5] += 1900;
   print ("time : $time[2]:$time[1]:$time[0] "."- $time[3]/$time[4]/$t
+ime[5].\n");
}
else
{
   print "oops\n";
}
[download]

It returns :

time : 14:4:12 - 21/7/2003 on my machine

, and

time :  0:0:0  - 21/7/2003 on a Win2k machine... :(

I checked the epoch time stamps (just to make sure the conversion bit wasn't the failing part) and the stamps are wrong under Win2k.