This can be irrelevant to your current problems but can save you on future problems: -M $filepath can return a negative age too! :    -M  Script start time minus file modification time, in days. (see -X).

Secondly, you are creating "exception" being some kind of hash with a key also called "exception" and then in your last code you compare $exception as a string. I would doublecheck that this $exception is indeed $exception->{'exception'} and not the original hash exception.

Thirdly and most importantly, the first chunk of code you showed has an if-statement which the first branch returns nothing. So your "age" exceptions are not returned. The second branch does return an exception HASH though.

Perhaps, place my $exception; after if( -e $filepath), then go through all your exception if-checks, remove all other my $exception... and finally return $exception only if it is defined. To achieve a state of lift-off you need to insert two more closing curly brackets.

So, you hit the nail on the head with the "exception" hash on point number two. It's weird that this hasn't come up with the other modules.

In the interest of making everything clear for future users, I am going to make sure that any reference to the $exception hash and the $exception->{exception} scalar value is made explicit. It would seem that the original programmer only had to worry about the $exception merely being defined, and in my ignorance, ignored the value of the $exception->{exception} value, even though I was defining it in my return.

I've only been working with perl for the past few months, sop if my vocabulary is off, please excuse me. Thank you for bringing that to my attention though, this has solved my problem.

sh: /home/ftp01.mbira.com/reports/futu.data: No such file or directory
md5sum: /home/ftp01.mbira.com/reports/futu.data: No such file or direc
+tory
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I am running this in Mac OS 10.13 terminal.

Any thoughts on where to look for trouble shooting this error, or maybe some kind of explanation of why the -e command is generating these md5sum and sh logs?

It isn't. Whatever is generating that output is not in the code you have shown. You should reduce your entire code to the smallest possible script which does generate those errors (an SSCCE) and provide that if you want more help to debug it. Without that, we can only guess (although my money is on one of either a race condition or more likely the $filepath in your subroutine isn't the path you think it is).

In the meantime, check out the Basic debugging checklist.

if (-e $filepath) {
        # the file exists
        if (-M $filepath > $maxage_days) {
            
            my $exception = {
                table => $tablename,
                exception  => 'outofdate',
                data  => {
                    file => $filepath, 
                    age  => sprintf("%.2f", (-M $filepath)*24) . ' hou
+rs',
                    still_copying => 0 
                }
            };
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This won't compile since you don't have the same number of opening and closing curly brackets, '{' and '}'. Your indentation is confusing folks also. One suggestion is to use a programming text editor that will help you keep track of opening and closing brackets and do syntax highlighting.

or perltidy, for a start.

if (-e $filepath)
{
   my $exception...
}
else
{
   my $exception...
}
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$exception is reference to a hash:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $exception = {table      => 'tablename',
                 exception  => 'outofdate'};
                 
my $exception2 =  {table      => 'tablename2',
                   exception  => 'allOk'};
                   
foreach my $error ($exception, $exception2 )
{
   print "$error->{exception}\n";
}
__END__
outofdate
allOk
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In general a "my" variable cannot be declared within a conditional statement.

Of course it can. Why should this be a problem?

You can declare a "my" variable in any lexical scope - the branches of an if-statement are just one example:

use strict;

my $whatever;

if($whatever) {
 my $something = "here";
}
else {
 my $something = "there";
}

print "look I compiled\n";
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can declare a "my" variable in any lexical scope. Well, ok but you can't use it outside of that scope. The OP's indenting is confusing to me. Your code works until you try to use $something outside of lexical scope.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $whatever;

if($whatever) {
   my $something = "here";
}
else {
   my $something = "there";
}

print "look I compiled $something\n";

__END__

Global symbol "$something" requires explicit package name (did you for
+get to declare "my $something"?) 
at Monks\Badcode.pl line 14.
Execution of Monks\Badcode.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

Process completed with exit code 255
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