A great way to work with filesystems in Perl is to use globbing to gather filenames and filesystem information with a Perl built-in.

 @files = <*>;
 foreach $file (@files) {
   print $file . "\n";
 }
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I know, it looks like an IO operation because of the <> but that's only true when a bareword like INPUT or a single-value scalar is used. Otherwise it is interpreted as a glob on the filesystem. You can also use the File::Glob module, which has a few more options and a little more functionality. Either way, this might be that "smarter way" that you were looking for of munging directories and finding the users' home directory/absolute path.

## glob on all files in home directory
  use File::Glob ':globally';
  my @sources = <~gnat/*>;
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Hope that helps!

<UPDATE> I also found some great info from this howto that specifically addresses backticks:
http://sial.org/howto/perl/backticks/