Hmm.. There seems to be no (obvious to me) way to edit or revise one's initial post here...

In any case, i've yet to really solve this problem, but i've worked around it using a call directly to the underlying OS's find function. i had to open it at a filehandle to get the output back, so system didn't seem workable.

i don't like this because it's quite non-portable (important to me since i'm developing on linux, but this will run on an old solaris box), but.... well, it works.

Here's the find_test.pl code i came up with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


# This is a poor way to list filenames using all the available
# switches for your local 'find' command.  It could probably be
# better accomplished with File::Find, but i was not able to 
# make that work.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper 'Dumper';

# here you can use whatever arguments you like.... 
open FIND, "find . -name *.html -maxdepth 3 -mindepth 3 |";

# a large number, MAXLINE if you're being conscientous
read FIND, my $find_output, 99999;

# the find output is returned as one big string, so split it
my @files = split(/\n/, $find_output);


# dump the raw find output.  note that it's all one value,
# with \n (newline) in it.
print Dumper [$find_output];

# now dump the array..  each 'hit' on it's own position
print Dumper [@files];


exit 0;
[download]

If anyone has a better way to do this, i'm highly interested!