Oops--I have Cygwin and ActiveState Perl installed, and used the wrong perlbug. On Cygwin, perl 5.8.2 does not have the exact problem I described, because realpath is aliased to the native (C) abs_path. However, abs_path (which is supposed to be a synonym for realpath) is aliased to fast_abs_path, which exhibits the problem. In 5.8.3, realpath is also aliased to fast_abs_path on Cygwin, so it should exhibit the problem (but I haven't tried it). The "obvious" fix is instead to use the native abs_path in all cases. The bug was meant to apply to ActivePerl 5.8.3 build 809. However, it appears from a brief test that even win32 has a native abs_path, which is for some reason not used. When I eliminated the two aliases from the 'MSWin32' case, it worked fine. That would still leave some platforms using the sub-optimal fast_abs_path. AndrewThread Previous