OK, some additional remarks after your problem is solved - as always, there's room for improvement:

• use strict and warnings - this was already suggested but it's important so I repeat it :)
• Substitute all the uses of local and use my instead. For further reading I strongly recommend Coping with Scoping by Dominus. I suspect the snippets you used to put this together were old and came from the time before my ...
• Use getopts instead of getopt and use the hash variant of the function call. These recommendations are not really necessary in this simple program but are in general a good idea (for the differences read up in the Getopt::Std documentation).
• Don't do nested greps, you can chain the tests together with &&

Here is my adapted version to show how these things look like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Cwd;
use Getopt::Std;

my %opts;
getopts('d:', \%opts);
my $start_dir = $opts{d};
$start_dir = getcwd() unless defined ($start_dir);

listDir($start_dir);
print ("\n\nfinished.\n\n");

sub listDir {
    my $thisdir = $_[0];
    print "\n$thisdir:\n";

    opendir THISDIR, $thisdir;
    my @allentries = readdir THISDIR;
    my @directories = sort grep(-d "$thisdir/$_" && !/^\.\.?$/, @allen
+tries);
    closedir THISDIR;

    foreach my $entry (@allentries) {
        print "\t$entry\n";
    }
    foreach my $entry (@directories) {
        chomp($entry);
        listDir("$thisdir/$entry");
    }
}
[download]

-- Hofmator

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.