im trying to avoid using cpan for this project

Bad idea. Your code is also sub-optimal:

• use strict missing
• & in front of function calls does not do what you think. Get rid of it, this ain't ancient Perl 4.
• local instead of my
• Recursion in loopDir will eventually run out of handles. Collect all subdirectories, then recurse after closing the directory handle. Or use a directory queue (shift the directory to read from, push every new directory found, run until queue is empty) and completely get rid of the recursion.
• close (MYFILE) is unreachable due to exit in front of it
• Two-argument open instead of three-argument open. Do you really need to support perl < 5.6 (more than twelve years old)?
• Bareword file handles instead of lexical ones
• open || die instead of open or die, same problem with chdir
• die without an error message ($!)
• opendir lacks an error check.

Alexander