It's the latter. :-)

The relevant portion of the docs is under the explanation of dirname() where it states:

           When
           using Unix or MSDOS syntax, the return value conforms to th
+e behav-
           ior of the Unix shell command dirname(1).  This is usually 
+the same
           as the behavior of fileparse(), but differs in some cases. 
+ For
           example, for the input file specification lib/, fileparse()
+ consid-
           ers the directory name to be lib/, while dirname() consider
+s the
           directory name to be .).
[download]

Have a look at how dirname (the unix command) behaves:

$ dirname foo/bar
foo
$ dirname foo/bar/
foo
$ dirname foo/bar/.
foo/bar
[download]

So, File::Basename is working as advertised. You should probably be using fileparse() rather than dirname() to get what you want. The docs guarantee that you can concatenate the components returned by fileparse() and get back the original filename.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";