Our fellow Monks have provided solutions to your particular problem. Here is yet another way to retrieve the leaf directory (or file) from a long path. It uses the splitdir function from the File::Spec core module. splitdir splits up an OS-independent path specifier, and returns a list. The [-1] just grabs the last element of the list.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Spec;

my $dir = (File::Spec->splitdir('/path/to/dir_i_want'))[-1];
print "$dir\n";

__END__

dir_i_want
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