Personally I like to do it like this¹:

use File::Path;

mkpath($dir);
-d $dir or die("Could not create ($dir)\n");
[download]

It depends a little on what we're really after here but in my experience it's generally not very interesting whether the directory could be created or not. What's interesting is that it's there so we can do stuff with it.

So that's what we test for.

/J

1) Encapsulated into ensure_dir($dir).