Since 99.99% of the readers will not have been around at the time this was discussed in the CB (e.g. me), here's an example of how it could be done with File::Path version 2. The idea is to pass an error collector (a reference to a scalar) to mkpath, and instead of dying it will instead push all errors it encounters onto the collector.

use strict;
use File::Path 'mkpath';
use Data::Dumper;

mkpath( 'a:/tmp', {error => \my $err});
@$err and print Dumper($err);

__PRODUCES__
$VAR1 = [
  {
    'a:/' => 'Permission denied; The device is not ready'
  },
  {
    'a:/tmp' => 'Permission denied; The device is not ready'
  }
];
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The error variable is guaranteed to be always a reference to an array so that you don't have to add make-work code to ensure that it is defined, is a reference to an array, etc. etc. Just use it in scalar context to see if it contains zero elements (== no errors).