Why do you have two back-slashes next to each other after the "\dir"?

I believe without it it would have just been protecting the quote instead of being a literal backslash

What is the current working directory for the shell that runs your perl script?

it is "dir", so it doesn't need to use the absolute path

Apart from that, are you certain that every directory (or any directory) contained in the script's current working directory actually contains a sub-path called '2010\01\01'?

the directories are based on the current date and are always there

When you say "I get the duplicate message but the files are not being added to the @delete array.", do you mean the output is "There are 0 duplicate files to delete"? If so, the previous questions are relevant.

yes

Do you see the outputs that say "Searching (path_string)"?

yes