in reply to du with backticks

Maybe it's time consider refactoring this via CPAN modules? For comparison, the following achieves a similar result, using File::Find::Rule and Filesys::DiskUsage:
#/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Filesys::DiskUsage qw/du/; use File::Find::Rule; use YAML; my $rule = File::Find::Rule->new; $rule->directory(); $rule->not($rule->new->name( qr/^.*Maildir.*(cur|new|courierimapkeywor +ds)$/)); my @dirs = $rule->in('.'); warn "dirs=@dirs"; my %sizes = du( { 'make-hash' => 1, 'human-readble' => 1, } , @dirs); print YAML::Dump(\%sizes);