I have two variables, $x and $y, containing file pathes, and would like to find out whether they refer to the same file. The solution should ideally work under Unix and Windows. It's not necessary that it works for symlinks too (though, of course, it would be nice).

I thought of using stat to get the inode numbers and see whether they are the same, but is this a reliable method on Windows too?

I could touch one of the files with a certain time stamp, and then stat the other file to see whether it got the same time stamp. This looks like a terrible hack, though.

In Java, there is a function JavaFileManager.isSameFile, which performs exactly this function, and I darkly believe to remember having seen this for Perl to, but could not find it anymore.

Any suggestions?