Yes, this is exactly the problem! The article you sent me to got me on the right path, but I thought it was too brief, or at least it didn't offer enough examples for me to figure out what was happen. You are right, however, the root of my problem was exactly that.

The following I thought was a very good article on the same thing, although their code is a little cryptic in some places. http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/10825_1128811_1

Finally The following is the re-written fileDir sub-routine that works just fine (although I think it looks a little ugly to me).

sub findDir{
    
    my ($dir, $min, $max) = @_;
    $min_depth = \$min;
    $max_depth = \$max;
    #print "findDir: $dir min: $min_depth max: $max_depth\n";
    $count_files = *count{0};
    
    find( {
        preprocess => \&preprocess,
        wanted => \&wanted,
    }, $dir);
    
    #print "count: $count_files\n";
    
    sub preprocess {
        my $depth = $File::Find::dir =~ tr[/][];
        #print "depth: $depth\n";
        return @_ if $depth < $$max_depth;
        print "depth: $depth max: $$max_depth\n";
        if ($depth == $$max_depth){
            print "greping\n";
            return grep { -df } @_;
        }
        return;
    }
    
    sub wanted {
       
        my $depth = $File::Find::dir =~ tr[/][];
        return if $depth < $$min_depth;
        
        if(!($_ =~ m/^\./)){
            $$count_files++;
        }
    }
    return $$count_files;
    
}
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