How to see if a directory exists or not in Perl?

Use -d (full list of file tests)

if (-d "cgi-bin") {
    # directory called cgi-bin exists
}
elsif (-e "cgi-bin") {
    # cgi-bin exists but is not a directory
}
else {
    # nothing called cgi-bin exists
}

As a note, -e doesn’t distinguish between files and directories. To check if something exists and is a plain file, use -f.