This is when the "Perl Functions by Category" index near the beginning of perlfunc comes in handy. "I know there's a function to do this file-related (network-related, regex-related, etc) thing, but I don't remember what it's called."

Functions for filehandles, files, or directories
   "-*X*", "chdir", "chmod", "chown", "chroot", "fcntl", "glob",
   "ioctl", "link", "lstat", "mkdir", "open", "opendir", "readlink",
   "rename", "rmdir", "stat", "symlink", "sysopen", "umask", "unlink",
   "utime"
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