Thanks for the corrections - esp for the grep-regex pitfall. Duh at myself for the push bit (putting it in mere round brackets and returning simple arrays doesn't work; should have thought of return refs and dereferencing them). Yes, it's a bit unclear, but esp when we're talking about a CGI that may have to handle large directories and somewhat substantial traffic I'd prefer to use it this and stick a comment in to explain it instead.

Makeshifts last the longest.