That's not what I'm seeing.

$ cat test.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
  
use strict;
use warnings;
 
my @files = (' ', ' . . ', ' .. ', '         ', ' .      ');
 
foreach (@files) {
  print "[$_] - ", -e $_ ? "yes\n" : "no\n";
}
$ ./test.pl
[ ] - no
[ . . ] - no
[ .. ] - no
[         ] - no
[ .      ] - no
$ perl -v
 
This is perl, v5.8.3 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
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