It's merely speculation that he assigned it using a double-quoted literal

Agreed. That's why likely work.

It might just as well have come from a readdir

But don't you have to combine the values from readdir with the path in order to get a fully qualified path?

Could he be doing something like  $targ = "$path/$fname";?

why would unlink have returned 1, as the OP states?

Not sure, but that construct looks suspect to me: my($no) = unlink $targ || carp "Unable to delete file $targ\n";.

What ends up in $no if unlink returns 0; the return value from carp()?

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In reply to Re^3: unlink fails to delete files with perculiar names by BrowserUk
in thread unlink fails to delete files with perculiar names by DaveARoberts

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