There’s just no point in doing such a mundane chore “by hand.”
Unless you need to do it "by hand" because the modules on CPAN don't do what you need to do. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't find any of the "file finders" modules (as you called them) that would handle long file paths (>260 characters) in Windows. Looking at possibly using Win32::LongPath to roll my own code to search through a Windows filesystem and handle the long path names.
Until I hit this long path issue, I probably would have agreed with what you said.