Thanks for putting up with me. I knew it was something stupid on my part.

No worries, glad to help! The File::Find::Rule docs aren't 100% clear on that ->name matches the basename only, but I got my insights from peeking at the code - it's basically just compiling to a File::Find routine, which you can see with the private method print $rule->_compile;, and there one can see it's matching against $_, and in File::Find by default that's just the basename of the file, without the directory.