I hadn't taken a look at File::stat before. It looks like the version for Perl 5.12 has many of the features I'd be interested in, but unfortunately my code needs to work on 5.10 or higher. 5.10 doesn't support overloading of -X and I'd have to create my own cando function (or equivalent), so the extra effort involved in an attempt to use a standard module that doesn't do what I need it do is probably more than it's worth.

I will remember it for later, though, once I can start assuming a newer Perl version.