Could you post some sample code that shows the strange behavior?

Keep in mind that -A is the script startup time (which can be found in $^T) minus the file access time--in days. stat returns the absolute last access time in seconds since the epoch.

The following gets the last access time from a file by both methods. I tried it on three different OSs (OS X, WinXP, and RH 9), and the results are the same.

# do it with stat
my $atime = (stat($ARGV[0]))[8];
print "stat says: ", scalar localtime $atime, "\n";

# do it with -A
$atime = $^T - (-A $ARGV[0]) * 86400;
print "-A says:   ", scalar localtime $atime, "\n";
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Brad