How about just defaulting to stripping s{[.]([^./\\]*)$}{} (slightly more portably) instead of having to pass in a huge (and likely incomplete) list of possible extensions. That interface never made much sense to me, and hence I don't use it (and I'm not surprised that it is slow). I'd say, if it hurts, stop doing it (use something other than File::BaseName for stripping extensions, such as that regex I show above, which is portable enough for most work, likely). (: