Yup, good point. And the best way to fix it would be to "use Cwd", which makes all that code unnecessary anyway:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Cwd qw/abs_path/;

print abs_path( $_ ) for ( @ARGV );
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That prints an empty string (no error message) whenever any non-final path component is non-existent or unreadable (due to permissions).