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Let's say we have the path: /login/user/temp/file.txt

Imagine splitting the path names into 5 containers. This is how we would do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use warnings;
use strict;

use File::Spec::Functions qw(splitdir);

my $path = '/login/user/temp/file.txt';

my @names = splitdir $path;

print $names[0];  # prints: ""
print $names[1];  # prints: "login"
print $names[2];  # prints: "user"
print $names[3];  # prints: "temp"
print $names[4];  # prints: "file.txt"
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The first array element is an empty string because nothing comes before the first directory separator of $path.