I absolutely agree with the other posters and I think that File::Find is the solution.

However if you want to fix your program keep a couple of things in mind: check if you're following symlinks and get the list at once evaluating <glob> in a list context instead of scalar context, for it might be confusing when mixed with recursion. You always use <*/> and if perl uses some sort of caching, in a scalar context, even in a deeper level of recursion, you'd get a file from the previous list of globbed files!

And symbolic links can lead you to infinite recursion as well.

To clarify with an example, I found out that this script is easily fooled by symlinks and even if there aren't any it goes into infinite recursion:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

sub do_list {
        my($level, $base_path) = @_;
        my @list;

#       @list = <$base_path/*>;
#       for (@list) {
        while(<$base_path/*>) {
                print '>' x $level, ' ';
                print "$_\n";
                next if -l $_;
                if(-d "$_") {
                        do_list($level + 1, $_)
                }
        }
        $level--;
}

do_list(1, $ARGV[0] || '.');
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Now, just get rid of the while and use the assignment and the for loop instead: evaluating the glob in list context prevents interferences between recursion and the "next" value returned by the "right" glob expression.

-- TMTOWTDI