Dangling symlinks On many OSs, you can have 'dangling' symlinks: $ ln -s nada dangling $ ls -l nada realfile dangling -rw-r--r-- 1 reegen reegen 151 Sep 17 10:00 realfile lrwxrwxrwx 1 reegen reegen 10 Sep 17 10:00 dangling -> nada ls: nada: No such file or directory $ perl -e '$_="realfile"; print "$_ Exists\n" if -e $_' realfile Exists $ perl -e '$_="nada"; print "$_ Exists\n" if -e $_' $ perl -e '$_="dangling"; print "$_ Exists\n" if -e $_'