You could use lstat to determine whether your directory is actually a symlink to a directory and readlink to find out where it is pointing. The standard Cwd module might also allow you to keep better track of which directory you are in. I'm not sure how useful these pointers will be when having to interact with sudo but, hopefully, they will help you move forward.

Maybe expanding on something like:

use File::Find; # might be helpful
use Cwd;        # also pretty useful with this sort of thing


my $files = <some array here...>;

my $where = readlink("$files");
    print "$files => $where\n";
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#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use perl::always;
my $perl_version = "5.12.4";
print $perl_version;

Of course then I am doing a system sudo call which is spawning a root shell with another context.

If I understand correctly, you want to do a "typical" chdir (as a typical user) to put yourself into a directory via a symlinked path, and then be able to use a consistent path string from this point, even while invoking a sudo process.

Try something like this maybe:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Cwd;

my $startup_path = getcwd;

my $symlink_path = "some/symlink/path";
chdir $symlink_path;

my $working_path = getcwd;

printf( "Started in %s, chdir'd to %s, now in %s\n",
        $startup_path, $symlink_path, $working_path );
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