Er, well you would be right if you weren't missing the fact that the mode here is actually an octal number that has to begin with a zero in Perl - that is to say 0755 will work fine whereas the 755 will not.

This is probably even easier to understand if you do:

my $mode = (stat('.'))[2] & 07777;
print $mode ,"\n";
printf "%o\n", $mode ;
print mode_to_string($mode);
[download]

Where the 07777 is a mask to remove the filetype information from the mode (as described in perlfunc).

/J\