Ugh! Yep, you're right, my bad... only, the code is too long for my liking. Can it be shorter? Could I use the operating system to pare down the code a bit by pre-gathering a list of all files? Something like

my @files = (reverse sort `dir /A-D /S`)[0..9];
[download]

In DOS, or ... (big pause)...
Aw shoot, in DOS the solution isn't even perl:

dir /A-D /O-S /S
[download]

That recursively lists all files from the current working directory on, sorted by largest file first. I imagine there's a combination of opts to ls that will do the same thing, eh? Maybe

ls -alSR  (which doesn't sort across directories)
ls -alR | sort -k 5  (maybe?)
(Except those don't suppress the directory names.  Hmmm.)
[download]

Sorry, I meant to write perl, but it came out rather OS-specific... but it's a lot smaller than the perl solution. Is that Appeal To False Laziness?