Unless you need to do it "by hand" because the modules on CPAN don't do what you need to do. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't find any of the "file finders" modules (as you called them) that would handle long file paths (>260 characters) in Windows. Looking at possibly using Win32::LongPath to roll my own code to search through a Windows filesystem and handle the long path names. Until I hit this long path issue, I probably would have agreed with what you said.

Yeah, but chances are, you still don't need to do it "by hand" :)

see Win32::Unicode , https://metacpan.org/pod/Win32::Unicode::Dir#findW-code-dir, with Path::Tiny like Re: links in pathnames under Windows 8 , Re^5: Trouble with File::Find::Rule (win32 unicode overload file test operators), Re^5: Is File::Find Unicode-(Conformant|Compliant|Enabled|Capable)?, mocking overloading filetest operator callback -f -d -e -X, ...