In scalar context, dircopy() returns the number of files copied. Are there actually files in the source directory?

The documentation isn't very clear but dircopy() returns undef if there is an error. So you actually should check to see if the return value is defined, not just true.

defined( dircopy($orig, $dest) ) or die "Copy failed: $!";
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Or, actually check the return value.

my $files_copied = dircopy($orig, $dest);
if (defined $files_copied) {
    print "Files copied: $files_copied\n"
}
else {
    die "Copy failed: $!";
}
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Try that and see if that helps you figure out what's going on.