I note, for those who might come across this node (and this is not meant to count as a rebuff to footpad -- I think it's good to think about why your code doesn't work, you usually (always?) learn something!) that if you want to exclude directories from being traversed by File::Find, you can set $File::Find::prune to 1 if the current directory matches the exclusion pattern.

Below is untested ...

# nifty trick -- make a hash to ease the lookup in the findit sub

my %excludeit;
# now set the keys of the hash 
# (== the members of your excluded directories array) 
# to have values of 1

@excludeit {@exclude_dirs} = (1) x @exclude_dirs;

# this would be the subroutine used by File::Find

sub findit {
    $File::Find::prune = 1 if $excludeit{$_};
    # ..
}
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Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor