Look at the preprocess option in the documentation.

The code can be used to sort the file/directory names alphabetically, numerically, or to filter out directory entries based on their name alone.

You can pre-process a directory and remove entries for backup directories based on a regex or lookup. File::Find will only follow and process the list of files/directories that are returned by this method.

The example below prints out all files and directories that start with A-D.

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Find;

find ({wanted => \&wanted, preprocess=> \&preproc, no_chdir=>1}, @ARGV
+);

sub wanted {
    print "wanted $_\n"
}

sub preproc {
#    print "Pre processing $_\n" foreach (@_);
    return grep {/^[A-Da-d]/}@_;
}
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