Anonymous subs are created using sub { }.

Just declare the variable outside of find.

use File::Find;

my $dir;
find(
    sub { $dir = $File::Find::name if ( /hello\.txt/ ); },
    '/tmp/test'
);
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Unfortunately, find will keep on searching for more matches. You can exit prematurely using die

use File::Find;

my $dir;
if (!eval {
    find(
        sub { die "match: $File::Find::name\n" if ( /hello\.txt/ ); },
        '/tmp/test'
    );
    1
}) {
    my $e = $@;
    die $e if !( ($dir) = /^match: (.*)/ );
}
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First answer:

I think that what you are trying to do is:

find( sub { $dir = $File::Find::name if ( /hello\.txt/ ) }, '/tmp/test
+' );
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defining an anonymous sub as callback. I don't understand how can your code "work" for you are using strict and $dir is not defined anywhere.

Second answer:

File::Find::find does not work so. As per documentation, the return value of the callback function is ignored by find. The correct way to do it is that of your first example.

there is no return value from File::Find, you need to use a "global" var to get this...

here is example code.....

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use File::Find;
use strict;

my @dirs;
find (\&dirs_deny_grp_other, $ENV{'HOME'});

print join ("\n",sort @dirs),"\n";

sub dirs_deny_grp_other
{
    return if ! -d || !stat;
    if ( ( (stat "$File::Find::name")[2] & 011) == 0  )
    {
       push @dirs, $File::Find::name;
    }
}
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Update: the above code looks for directories. It is more complex than what you need to do, but if you understand it, your code will be simple to do. Your code would return if -d (only look at files that are not directories). If you want to look at and find all files that match /hello\.txt$/i, you will have to look at every file in every sub-directory.