I am having a little difficulty interpreting your question, so if this answer is off point I apologize. I think what is happening is that since you are accessing the $dir variable outside of the conditional loop, you are caching a value of $dir from a previous traverse of the loop. Perhaps this could be fixed with something along the lines of

if ($fsline =~ /(.:\\.*)/){
    $dir = $1;
    print "$dir\n";  #works fine here
} else {
    next;
}

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In reply to Re^3: Nested While Loop Problem by kennethk
in thread Nested While Loop Problem by Smith

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