Please, instead of showing excerpts from debugger sessions together with some narrative, write and show a short program that replicates the steps you did. This makes it far more clear what you did and what results you get.

A rough start could be:

#!perl -w
use strict;
my $d1 = '/this/file';
my $d2 = '/that/file';

for ($d1, $d2) {
    print "[$_] " . (-e $_ ? "exists" : "does not exist") . "\n";
};

if (...) {
...
};

# Show the contents of the directories in question
system("find /this /that");
[download]