it need to *not* match "." or ".." entries

How about getting rid of these just like you do with the other useless lines: 

...
foreach(@_) {
    # skip if it doesn't start with either a space or backslash
    next if (!/^[ \\]/);
    # skip if it's just "." or ".."
    next if (/^\s*\.{1,2}\s/);

    if (/^\\/) { $path = "$_\\" }
    elsif (/^\s*(.*\S)\s{5,}([HDRSA]+)\s*(\d+)\s*(.*)/) {
        my ($file,$att,$size,$date) = ($1,$2,$3,$4);
        my $ext = ( $file =~ /\.([^.]+)$/ ) ? $1 : "DIR";
        print ...;
    } }

[download]

That last bit about setting $ext follows your assumption that if there's no dot in the name, it must be a directory (but I think this is not a reliable assumption). Note that file names may contain multiple periods, and I think you want $ext to hold just the characters after the last one (in your original version, a file name like "rel_3.1.tar.gz" would set $ext to "1.tar.gz").

Your expression for getting/setting $path was also a bit odd. The perlre man page says: 

 Also remember that "|" is interpreted as a literal within
 square brackets, so if you write "[fee|fie|foe]" you're
 really only matching "[feio|]".

[download]
And of course, directory names might include dash, period or other punctuation that wouldn't match \w. Your code made it seem like lines with initial slash would contain only a path name and nothing else, so I simplified on that basis (but I don't know if this assumption is correct).

In reply to Re: Happy fun regexping by graff
in thread Help needed with reducing function to a single regex by cyberconte

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