Probably because the 10th element in the array returned by stat() is actually the change time of the inode (which probably isn't available under Win32), not the modification time of the file. 

  0 dev      device number of filesystem
  1 ino      inode number
  2 mode     file mode  (type and permissions)
  3 nlink    number of (hard) links to the file
  4 uid      numeric user ID of file's owner
  5 gid      numeric group ID of file's owner
  6 rdev     the device identifier (special files only)
  7 size     total size of file, in bytes
  8 atime    last access time since the epoch
  9 mtime    last modify time since the epoch
 10 ctime    inode change time (NOT creation time!) since the epoch
 11 blksize  preferred block size for file system I/O
 12 blocks   actual number of blocks allocated

You probably want 

$modify=(stat($filename))[9];

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In reply to Re: Why does stat work sporadically? by mr.nick
in thread Why does stat work sporadically? by Anonymous Monk

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