Thanks.. eval works perfectly.

Not really. Why cause an error and then silence *all* errors when it's easier to not cause it in the first place?

my ($cretime) = eval { stat("$SPOOL/$file")->ctime }
   or next;

push @files, [ $cretime, $file ];
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vs

my $stat = stat("$SPOOL/$file")
   or next;

push @files, [ $stat->ctime, $file ];
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I used ctime as I want the time that the file was added to the directory by another script.

ctime definitely doesn't return what you want.

$ perl -MFile::stat -le'print "".localtime( stat("a")->ctime )'
Wed Jul 29 12:13:21 2009

$ chmod u+r a

$ perl -MFile::stat -le'print "".localtime( stat("a")->ctime )'
Wed Jul 29 12:13:46 2009
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