Thank you all for your suggestions. This is the code I ended up using, and it works great:

opendir DIR, "." or die $!;
my @dirs = grep { /object...000/ && -d "$_" } readdir(DIR);
closedir DIR;
@dirs = sort @dirs;
my $highest = $dirs[-1];
print "highest: $highest\n";
$highest =~ s/object//g;
$highest += 1000;
my $limit = $highest + 10000;
($login,$pass,$uid,$gid) = getpwnam('apache')
            or die "apache not in passwd file";
while ($highest < $limit) {
print "object$highest\n";
mkdir "object$highest";
chown $uid, $gid, "object$highest";
chmod 0777, "object$highest";
   $highest += 1000;
}
[download]

Thanks again.