I personally believe that if this is a question, then it should be marked with... a question mark. Anyway, the answer is yes, or at least that is a possible way to do it. (Except that, as a minor point, you should quote the backslash.) But more importantly why, precisely, should you run the above line "as a perl script?" The whole point was that probably a single find(1) command is better suited to your need than a whole Perl program. (Although one may consider there that perl is called multiple times in the second case, and this includes a overhead... probably a completely irrelevant consideration, in this particular situation - and there are simple cures, anyway.)