Works better if you add next if $item eq '.' or $item eq '..'; after the foreach

readdir gives you the names in the directory... not path names, so when you call the printdir recursively you'll need to prefix the current directory to each element of the list. (Naturally you'll need to change your '.' test accordingly.

Anyway this seems to work on my machine.

#!perl -w
use strict;
use Carp;

printdir(@ARGV);

sub printdir {
    my $item;
    foreach $item(@_) {
      next if $item =~ /\.{1,2}$/;
      if (-d $item) {
        print "$item\n";
        opendir(SUBDIR, $item) or croak "Can't open directory :$!";
        my @subdir_items = readdir(SUBDIR);      #+
        closedir(SUBDIR);                        #+  
        printdir(map {"$item/$_"}@subdir_items); #+
      }
    }
  }

Oh, by the way the equivalent in my previous post should have been

perl -Mstrict -MFile::Find -wle 'find sub{print $File::Find::dir if -d},@ARGV' .

Update: Just saw merlyn's post. The above ran on Win32 because (as he says) the Windows port recognizes forward slashes as valid directory separators. I don't know whether this is an issue on other non unix ports. Still, I agree with him, it's a lot safer here to stay with the standard.

Update 2: The '.' test is broken: it will match any file ending with a '.'. You'd need to split off the file name from the path, so you might as well use File::Spec... Oh good grief, why did I ever post this code? This'll teach me to shut up :(