use strict; use warnings; use File::Basename qw( fileparse ); my %seen; my @directories; while () { (undef, my $path) = fileparse( $_ ); #push @directories, $path; ## update, I indended to put the push inside the unless block. ## The original works but not exactly as I expected since it puts ## duplicates in the array. #print "$path\n" unless $seen{$path}++; unless ($seen{$path}++) { print "$path\n"; push @directories, $path; } } print "="x70,"\n"; foreach my $index (0..$#directories-1){ my $current = $directories[$index]; print "$current\n" if not $directories[$index+1] =~ /\Q$current/ ; } ### assuming the last one is always terminal print $directories[$#directories], "\n"; __DATA__ testing123/ foobar/ helloworld/ helloworld/r1/ helloworld/r1/helloworld-5-0.noarch.rpm helloworld/r1/testfile23.txt helloworld/r1/tomcat-7.0.27.rpm helloworld/r2/ helloworld/r2/helloworld-2-0.noarch.rpm helloworld/r2/testfile12.txt helloworld/r2/tomcat-5.0.52.rpm hellotest/