The \Q within the pattern match is something ive not noticed before (Ive just taken a look at http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlre.html) thanks for that, I have had issues before with replacing general text within a regular expression so that will help me out a lot.

The only reason that I used an unlocalised global for the directory call was simply due to the size of the script I wrote, I know its not going to be used anywhere else. However Ill take note of your comment for future scripts.