The answer you are looking for is the File::Find module. This module encapsulates recursing through directories very well.

Some code to get you started :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use File::Find;

my @searchdirs = ( ".", "c:/", "d:/" );

# And here is the regular expression to check
# for an unwanted directory. In my example,
# I chose the directory name .CVS as an
# "unwanted" directory
my $unwanteddir = ".CVS";

find( sub {
  # In this function,we decide what to do 
  # with each thing we find. We find both,
  # files and directories.
  
  # first check, if we have a directory :
  if (-d $File::Find::name) {
    print "Directory : $File::Find::name\n";
    # Now we check if it is unwanted :
    if ($File::Find::name =~ m!(^|/)$unwanteddir(/|$)!) {
      print "In unwanted directory.\n";
      # And tell File::Find that we don't want to look at
      # this directory
      $File::Find::prune = 1;
    };
  } elsif (-f $File::Find::name) {
    # It's a file
    print "File : $File::Find::name\n";
  } else {
    # It's a symlink or something else we can't handle
  };

} , @subdirs );        # here is the end of the find() function call
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I think it depends on whether your 'few' directories are full pathnames or all '.CVS' directories as above. Or some other requirement we don't know about.

Here's something that includes the first two:

use File::Find;

my @abs_dirs=qw(/dont/go/here /stay/out);
my @all_dirs=qw(.CVS .stayout);

my %abs_dirs;
@abs_dirs{@abs_dirs}=();
my %all_dirs;
@all_dirs{@all_dirs}=()

find (sub {
 $File::Find::prune=1, return if -d and (exists $abs_dirs{$File::Find:
+:name} or exists $all_dirs{$_});

 # Process other files, dirs
 #
}, ".");
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Update: runrigs fix (see below) was incorporated

use File::Find

my @skip = qw( skip1 skip2 skip3 );

find( \&wanted, $directory );

sub wanted {
    return if grep { -d $_ and $_ eq $File::Find::name } @skip;
    ...
}
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