I wasn't aware about Path::Class. I was suprised upon reading the docs that it provides two distinct objects without a base implementing public interfaces for common behaviours. I would just say,

$ perl -MFile::Spec -wle 'my $path = shift; my $last = (File::Spec->sp
+litpath($path))[-1]; print $last' /etc/httpd/conf
conf
$ perl -MFile::Spec -wle 'my $path = shift; my $last = (File::Spec->sp
+litpath($path))[-1]; print $last' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
httpd.conf
[download]

I think you can just pass the object to File::Spec::splitpath() function because the class implements string overloading method. So, you don't have to care whether what you pass is ::File or ::Dir object.

$ perl -MPath::Class -wle 'my $path = shift; my $obj = file($path); pr
+int +(File::Spec->splitpath($obj))[-1]' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
httpd.conf
$ perl -MPath::Class -wle 'my $path = shift; my $obj = dir($path); pri
+nt +(File::Spec->splitpath($obj))[-1]' /etc/httpd/conf
conf
[download]

Of course, you still have to know what object you want to create in the first place.