Regular expressions aren't necessary if you sort the hash keys first and take advantage of the hierarchical nature of Win32 pathnames. Sorting insures that the shortest path that has been created or deleted will always show up first and get added first to your final list of changes.

I'm not exactly sure what %current and %prior hold. Assuming that %current stores the results of comparing a past and current directory listing (created directories assigned the value 'created', deleted assigned the value 'deleted'), here is how you would show only the top most directory that has been created.

# always use strict and warnings - debugging for free!
use strict;
use warnings;

my %current = ('C:\1\x\3\4' => 'created',
               'C:\1\x\3'   => 'created',
               'C:\1\x'     => 'created'
               'C:\1\2\3\4' => 'deleted',
               'C:\1\2\3'   => 'deleted',
               'C:\1\2'     => 'deleted'
              );
my %unique;
node:
foreach my $node (sort keys %current) {
  #look for parent directories in %unique
  #skip this one if we find a match
  my @aNames = split(/\\/, $node);
  my $k='';
  for my $i (0..$#aNames) {
    $k .= '\\' if $i;
    $k .= $aNames[$i];
    next node if exists $unique{$k};
  }

  #no match, so this is the actual directory that moved
  $unique{$k} = $current{$k};
}

use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);
print(Dumper(\%unique));

#outputs
#$VAR1 = {
#          'C:\\1\\x' => 'created'
#          'C:\\1\\2' => 'deleted'
#        };
[download]

To understand the above code, you may find it helpful to look up the following links in the Perl documentation:

• strict - explains what use strict does and why you should use it
• warnings - explains what use warnings does and why you should use it
• sort - Perl sorting - provides a default, but also allows you to roll your own sorting rules.
• split - break up a string into substrings
• next - explains what next node means.
• perlop - this is where to look for information about operators - I assume you already know what '.' means, but just in case ...
• Data::Dumper - dumps the contents of a variable

Best, beth

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