Agreed. I should have been more precise in my scoping of the problem (and have updated my original post accordingly). My particular use cases for this routine involves paths that can be presumed to be real file names. But others interested in a "comparePath" function might have different goals. Even in cases where that assumption can't be made, Perl offers, what I presume is, a portable way to identify symbolic links (-l, for example) so those could easily be filtered out and removed from consideration. Or alternatively one could use a function like readlink to convert the link to its real name. Do you have experiences where readlink and -l have caused problems?
Come to think of it, I don't know how to detect mounts. Is -l also used?
Best, beth