Well ... never. I wrote something like

my @files;
find( sub {
  push @files, $File::Find::name 
    if <some condition>
}, '.')
[download]

a few times though. And usualy the resulting list was much smaller than a list that would contain all files&directories. Most of the time though I want to actually DO something with the files.

I do agree the several package variables and $_ are a bit strange, it would be cleaner if the filename and path was passed to &wanted as parameters, but I don't have a problem with it anyway.

I do not understand your comment about the USE_NLINK though. From perldoc File::Find:

You can set the variable $File::Find::dont_use_nlink to 1, if you want to force File::Find to always stat directories. This was used for file systems that do not have an "nlink" count matching the number of sub-directories. Examples are ISO-9660 (CD-ROM), AFS, HPFS (OS/2 file system), FAT (DOS file system) and a couple of others.

You shouldn't need to set this variable, since File::Find should now detect such file systems on-the-fly and switch itself to using stat. This works even for parts of your file system, like a mounted CD-ROM.

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature