I'm attempting to check directory permissions in a script and wanted to use "stat" to check the permissions and prepare a report to the user of directories which aren't standard. Stat appears to return an array of 13 strings with the third being $mode. When I tried the following ( testStat being a ubuntu linux directory ), I get what I expect. If I include "use File::stat", I don't. I haven't had a chance to touch perl in a while. Shouldn't I be using File::stat, and shouldn't it work in the following example?: