Actually, this is a part of a bigger perl script. Of course, you are right, I could use unix's find in a system command, but that would mean shell invokation and I would prefer not to.
Could you be more specific about your suggestion using regex options?
The options I mentioned are to find. Your initial post about having to prepend the path (also in another reply) does not seem all that odious. You could also check out File::Find