in reply to Re^3: When should a wheel be reinvented
in thread When should a wheel be reinvented
If you're motivated, I'd suggest trying to find some of Dominus' comments on File::Find. His opinion seems to resemble yours - File::Find works well except that the API can be very inconvenient. IIRC his book (which should be coming out really soon...) on higher-order Perl implements an iterator-based equivalent to File::Find.
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Meditations