What toolic (probably) meant was the "example under "die"" mentioned in the docu of chdir. If you do "perldoc -f die" you will see these two examples:

   die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n" unless chdir '/usr/spool/news';
   chdir '/usr/spool/news' or die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n"
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The two lines are equivalent (to each other and to the line toolic posted) and show how to use chdir, specifically the use of $! to print the error message that the operating system returned.

The error message will tell you why it couldn't chdir. But to further explore the situation add

use Cwd;   #at the start of your script

...

print "We are here: ",cwd(),"\n"; #test where you are in the directory
+ structure

#alternatively this works too, but is not as portable:
print "We are here:"; system('pwd');
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