JJ, out of curiosity, why did you do:
my $dir = "//home//schmoe//somedir";

(i.e. the double slashes?) The only place where I've found this appropriate is when using paths in the DOS/Win32 format, as obviously if you did c:\noddy if a double-quoted string, Perl looks for a dir named 'c: linebreak oddy'.

Is there something I don't know about here? BTW Win32 users - you can use the UNIX-style slashes when telling Perl to open files etc! I far prefer / to \!