It's always good to include (a small bit of) the code you are having a problem with. Thus we can see you missed a bit in the description of readdir(). readdir() only gives you the next name out of the directory, which is thus only the filename, and not including the path to the directory. In steves example notice that he used directory '.' so there wasn't a path to worry about.

Anyway, check this modified version of your code:

use File::Spec;

my $dir = "c:\\Perl";

opendir DIR, $dir or die $!;

foreach my $file (readdir(DIR)){
    my  $path_to_file = File::Spec->catfile( $dir, $file );
    printf "  I see file '%s'    path '%s'\n", $file, $path_to_file;
    next  unless -e $path_to_file;

    unless(-d $path_to_file){
       print $path_to_file;
       my @stats = lstat ($path_to_file);
       print "\t\$stat = $stats[7]\n";
    }
   
}
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Note that the full path to the file to use with -d , -e , or lstat() is the combination of the directory path plus the filename returned from readdir().

I used the File::Spec module to combine these because I'd rather let it worry about combining directory paths and filenames and getting the '/' or '\' separators correct.