In this example, the $file variable contains the absolute path to example.txt.

my $file = "/tmp/example.txt";

Printing the $file variable . . . 

print "$file \n";

. . . will return the absolute path to example.txt.

/tmp/example.txt

The File::Basename module can be used to create parse the filename and base directory. In this example, the $base_directory variable will contain a value of "/tmp" and the $file_name variable will contain a value of "example.txt".

my $base_directory = File::Basename::dirname($file);
my $file_name      = File::Basename::basename($file);