If you're doing this on a unix machine, you don't need perl at all. While File::Find is part of the Perl "core", it is noticeably slower than the unix-native "find" utility. All you need is a unix command line like this:

find /cdw/home_dir/s006258/CSPAM -name '*.sas' -print0 | xargs -0 chmo
+d 644
[download]

Note the single-quotes around the '*.sas', to keep the asterisk from being "interpreted" by the shell.

Perl is great, but for little things like this, the shell can be better.