In addition to your books and newsgroups, you might want to add searching through the bundled, online documentation as part of your looking-things-up routine. In particular, perlfunc says, under the entry for readdir:

If you're planning to filetest the return values out of a readdir(), you'd better prepend the directory in question. Otherwise, because we didn't chdir() there, it would have been testing the wrong file.

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

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