I proposed the link/unlink solution because IMHO it allows for finer granularity of error handling (not that my example took advantage of this, but I could have). Also, according to this earlier perlmonks article rename a user was experiencing rename failures which ended up deleting the file being renamed.

Of course, this shouldn't be an issue if the perl rename function really just calls the system rename call. I guess this depends on which OS you are running.