I was assuming stat would know to work on the current directory.

stat does work on the current directory. Unfortunately, the files you are listing aren't in the current directory. They are in dir $dirname. . and .. happens to exist in both the current directory and in dir $dirname, so that's why stat "worked" on them. (Well, it didn't really work, since you weren't getting info on what you thought you were getting info.)

This will go into an html doc so that's why you see the break tag. Cheers

The bug I pointed out isn't the tags, it's the plain text being printed along with the tags. That plain text needs to be converted to HTML (using CGI's escapeHTML or HTML::Entities's encode_entities).