in reply to Better way to define global variables
Any chance you have another Utilities.pm lying around? Try:
use strict; use Utilities; print $INC{'Utilities.pm'},"\n"; print "This is the value for SYS_DIR=$SYS_DIR";
and see whether you get the correct path.
I have no problems with your code after making choroba's proposed changes.
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom