4. I was left with a lot of empty directories. I ran find with rmdir a couple of times do get rid of them.

A "couple of times"??

A pure perl solution is to use File::Find and use finddepth instead of find. That way it'll kill the deepest lieing empty directories first.

Oh, and rmdir will not delete a directory if it's not empty.

So you can easily recursively delete empty directories in Perl using:

use File::Find qw(finddepth);
finddepth sub { -d and rmdir $_ and printf STDERR "rmdir: %s\n", $File
+::Find::name }, @dirs;
[download]

which can probably easily be converted to a one-liner — and shortened if you don't like the verbosity:

finddepth sub { -d and rmdir $_ }, @dirs;
[download]

I haven't tried running rmdir on a plain file. Probably it's safe.