Good thing you're just "thinking". It also matches ".\n" and "..\n", thanks to $'s little-understood feature of matching before the optional newline at the end of the string.
Remember that $item has been prefixed by the
directory, so we want to filter out elements like
foo/bar/. and fi/fo/fum/..
Better would be to extract the file name and compare it
to current/parent directory in a portable fashion. this
will work on *nix or windows. I have no idea what it might
do on a MAC or on VMS.