It really, really helps to post a code fragment that demonstrates the problem. The challenge with trying to describe what you're doing is that if you have blind spots, they carry over into your description. With code, we have something objective to analyze.

Without code to look at, I can't tell from your description whether you're trying   mkdir("/blah/10", 0nnn) or die "/blah/10: $!"; or 

  chdir("/blah") or die "/blah: $!";
  mkdir("10", 0nnn) or die "10: $!";

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One of these is fundamentally wrong. The other should work, or should tell you why it isn't working.

In reply to Re: freaky mkdir problem by dws
in thread freaky mkdir problem by markguy

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