First please learn the value of indenting you code properly so you can see the flow. If you don't know how get a copy of perltidy from sourceforge and let it do it for you till it comes naturally. Try something like this:

#! perl -w

use strict;
use File::Copy;

my $infile = "c:\\doclist1.chr";
my @directories;

# first lets build our directory list
open IN, "<$infile" or die "Couldn't open $infile, $!";
while (<IN>) {
    chomp;
    my @fields   = split /,/;
    my $path_str = $fields[6];
    do { warn "Empty field 7"; next } unless $path_str;
    my @path = split /\\/, $path_str;
    # push the directories into an array
    push @directories, join "\\", @path[ 0, 5, 6 ];
}
close IN;

# now we have a directory list in @directories let's process it
for my $dir ( @directories ) {
    process_dir($dir);
}

exit;

sub process_dir {
    my $dir = shift;
    do { warn "$dir does not exist!\n"; return } unless -e $dir;
    opendir DIR, $dir or do { warn "Could not open $dir $!\n" ; return
+ };
    while ( my $file = readdir DIR ) {
        next unless -f "$dir\\$file";
        next unless $file =~ m/\.rtf$/;
        copy( "$dir\\$file", "C:\\testfiles\\$file" )
          or die "Failed to copy $file: $!\n";
    }
}
[download]

Once you have the basic logic working you can add in File::Find if you need to recurse a directory structure in your process dirs sub. There were a lot of problems with your code. Foremost was that you wanted to push a list of directories into @directory but were not pushing and even if you were the my declaration in the loop would erase it every loop.

You actually don't need @directories at all a you can just call process_dirs() in your main loop like this:

#! perl -w

use strict;
use File::Copy;

my $infile = "c:\\doclist1.chr";
open IN, "<$infile" or die "Couldn't open $infile, $!";
while (<IN>) {
    chomp;
    my @fields   = split /,/;
    my $path_str = $fields[6];
    do { warn "Empty field 7"; next } unless $path_str;
    my @path = split /\\/, $path_str;
    my $dir = join "\\", @path[ 0, 5, 6 ];
    process_dir($dir);
}
close IN;

sub process_dir {
    my $dir = shift;
    do { warn "$dir does not exist!\n"; return } unless -e $dir;
    opendir DIR, $dir or do { warn "Could not open $dir $!\n" ; return
+ };
    while ( my $file = readdir DIR ) {
        next unless -f "$dir\\$file";
        next unless $file =~ m/\.rtf$/;
        copy( "$dir\\$file", "C:\\testfiles\\$file" )
          or die "Failed to copy $file: $!\n";
    }
}
[download]

cheers

tachyon

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