my $dir = { name => '.',
            contents => [
                { name => 'subdir 1', contents => [...] },
                { name => 'subdir 2', contents => [...] } 
            ],
          };
[download]

Then you'd have a real tree-structure, which you could iterate recursively. You don't get the ease of the quick solution, but you get some robustness and flexibility. Plus, you can wrap this in a class structure and write accessor methods.

Best of all, you could use Class::Tree, which provides a premade OO interface to treelike structures of this kind... Haven't used it myself, but the docs list methods for reading directory trees directly from the filesystem.

stephen