That definitely appears to be the case. My point is that, perhaps perl should answer the question asked, i.e. is the object (directory in this case) writable. The answer should not be OS dependant, ie. different if it is an unmounted but automountable directory. I just want to know if I can write a file to it, which I can in this case, mounted or not. I should not have to write code that works around the issues raised by automounted filesystems.