I don't think that you can do it with stat, but perldoc -f -X will tell you another simple way to do what you want. In brief:

my $filename = "/path/to/file";

print "Regular file\n" if (-f $filename);
print "Directory\n" if (-d $filename);
print "Symlink\n" if (-l $filename);
print "Pipe\n" if (-p $filename);
print "Sockete\n" if (-S $filename);
...
[download]

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET