I'm not quite sure of the what you are suggesting there, but it does sound good. Having a unique key for each file is nice, but I'm tempted to suggest that I can build that very easily as I do my hash traversal. In use, I'm likely to get the hashref for the directory, and then iterate over the files or something like that.

The obvious solution would be an object, but I'm not found of objects in this sort of work. They aren't particularily perlish. I'm not exactly sure what would be though.

I look forwards to your publishing your code - I have a use for it so I can guarantee you a user right away.