The answer you are looking for is the File::Find module. This module encapsulates recursing through directories very well.

Some code to get you started :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use File::Find;

my @searchdirs = ( ".", "c:/", "d:/" );

# And here is the regular expression to check
# for an unwanted directory. In my example,
# I chose the directory name .CVS as an
# "unwanted" directory
my $unwanteddir = ".CVS";

find( sub {
  # In this function,we decide what to do 
  # with each thing we find. We find both,
  # files and directories.
  
  # first check, if we have a directory :
  if (-d $File::Find::name) {
    print "Directory : $File::Find::name\n";
    # Now we check if it is unwanted :
    if ($File::Find::name =~ m!(^|/)$unwanteddir(/|$)!) {
      print "In unwanted directory.\n";
      # And tell File::Find that we don't want to look at
      # this directory
      $File::Find::prune = 1;
    };
  } elsif (-f $File::Find::name) {
    # It's a file
    print "File : $File::Find::name\n";
  } else {
    # It's a symlink or something else we can't handle
  };

} , @subdirs );        # here is the end of the find() function call
[download]

use File::Find;

my @abs_dirs=qw(/dont/go/here /stay/out);
my @all_dirs=qw(.CVS .stayout);

my %abs_dirs;
@abs_dirs{@abs_dirs}=();
my %all_dirs;
@all_dirs{@all_dirs}=()

find (sub {
 $File::Find::prune=1, return if -d and (exists $abs_dirs{$File::Find:
+:name} or exists $all_dirs{$_});

 # Process other files, dirs
 #
}, ".");
[download]

Update: runrigs fix (see below) was incorporated

'$File::Find::dir' above should be '$File::Find::name', since '...dir' gives you the directory above the current directory '$_'.

Too bad we don't get to edit Answers :(

use File::Find

my @skip = qw( skip1 skip2 skip3 );

find( \&wanted, $directory );

sub wanted {
    return if grep { -d $_ and $_ eq $File::Find::name } @skip;
    ...
}
[download]