The "traditional" *NIX way of doing things like this - using backticks to call the shell and putting together filenames "$like/$this" - starts showing its problems when you start going cross-platform and filenames get more interesting than /var/something/foo_bar (in my experience, "interesting" filenames are more common in Windows than *NIX).

Instead, use something like Path::Class for your filename manipulations, and something like IPC::System::Simple for calling external programs (there are plenty of other similar modules but these should be enough to get started with). In this case, you should be able to do what you want with IPC::System::Simple's capturex('dosomething',$File::Find::name) as a replacement for the backticks. capturex avoids the shell and its interpolations altogether, so funky filenames should work.