While a little out of the target of my OP, I've found that Cwd actually has something that really cleans up a path dealing with all the symlink issues:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Cwd 'abs_path';

my $somepath = "/var/log/../../home/poletti/../../etc/passwd";

print "starting path: [$somepath]\n";
print "abs_path     : [", abs_path($somepath), "]\n"

__END__
starting path: [/var/log/../../home/poletti/../../etc/passwd]
abs_path     : [/etc/passwd]
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According to the docs:

       abs_path
             my $abs_path = abs_path($file);

           Uses the same algorithm as getcwd().  Symbolic links and re
+lative-
           path components ("." and "..") are resolved to return the c
+anonical
           pathname, just like realpath(3).
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This probably requires that the file actually lives in the filesystem, but most of the time it's what one wants. Thank you all for the contributions, anyway :)