You could use a system call to do it from within your script. system "chmod -R $directory"; Otherwise if you really wanted or needed to use Perl's chmod function it takes a list of files so you could either use File::Find to construct a list beforehand or use File::Find and chmod on each of the files individually. Your easiest solution would be a system calll. If you really want to do it the other way you may want to reference How do I recursively process files through directories