It's an interesting discussion (I don't think I'd call it a "rant") and as usual MJD makes a lot of sense. What I don't get from it is that I was somehow wrong to have suggested that the OP include the pragmas.

Of course, it isn't really about having the use strict; use warnings in the code as posted. It's about posting code which is strict safe and warnings clean. In fact, if the OP had enabled strict, he would have caught a non-trivial bug having to do with variable naming ($Dir vs. $Direction). And warnings would have (or could have, if he paid close enough attention) helped him catch the bug in the line

if ( $Volume =~ /a-z/ or /A-Z/ ) . . .
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