OK, so thanks for the advice, all 3 of you. I tried out your suggestions, and got a temp script up and running. I threw in a bunch of print statements, to see what was happening, and it all looks good. But, something isn't working right. Somehow, the grep statement in the if isn't coming out right. I thought to use
if (-e $back)
instead of
if (grep {$back} @files),
but I am unsure how to test for files in a different directory.. 

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Path;
use File::Copy;
use Cwd;

print "Your Input: ";
chomp(my $filename = <STDIN>);
my $dir = getcwd;
my $backupdir = 'backup_files';
my $back = $filename . ".bak";
my $backful = $dir . "/" . $backupdir . "/" . $back;

print "\$dir is: $dir\n";
print "\$filename is: $filename\n";
print "\$backupdir is: $backupdir\n";
print "\$back is: $back\n";
print "\$backful is: $backful\n";


unless (-e $backupdir) {
  mkpath($backupdir);
  }
if (-e $backupdir) {
  if (-d $backupdir) {
    opendir (DIR, $backupdir) or die $!;
    my @files = readdir DIR;
    print "\@files is: \n";
    foreach (@files) {
      print $_, "\n";
      }
    if (grep {$back} @files) {
      print "Backup copy of $filename exists!\n";
      }
    else {
      copy ($filename, $backful); 
      print "Backup copy of the file has been created\n";
      }
    }
  else {
    print "\$backupdir exists, but it is not a directory\n";
    }
  }

[download]

Any thoughts on where I am going wrong?

Thanks

In reply to Re^2: Is there a -e test for directories, like there is for files? by mdunnbass
in thread Is there a -e test for directories, like there is for files? by mdunnbass

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