Print out the filename and think about whether the file can be found that way. readdir does not return the filename together with the directory in which the file was found.

From perlfunc:

-M Script start time minus file modification time, in days.

Note the units: days

You print the integer portion of $diff: int($diff), so unless it has been more than one day since the directory was modified, your result will be 0.

To see that -M is returning a non-zero result, try your program without the int(). You might try the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $dirname = ".";
opendir(DIR, $dirname) || die "can't opendir $dirname': $!";
my @dots = readdir(DIR);
closedir DIR;

foreach my $file (@dots){
    my $diff = -M $file;
    print "The age of $file is $diff : " . $diff . " : " . int($diff) 
+. "\n";
}
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Thanks for the reply. The age of the directory is displayed only for "." and "..". For the rest of the files it and subdirectories it displays as 0. How can I print the age of all files and subdirectories within a directory

The script in my previous post prints non-zero times for all files and directories in the current directory when I run it on my system.

If you are running the same script and getting times of zero for everything other than "." and "..", then something quite strange is happening. I suggest you post the script you are running (the whole script, not part of it and remember to use code tags so we can read it), a sample of the output you get on your system and details of your system including operating system, version, perl distribution and version.