Good advice dimmesdale, same with all the rest. But one point:

However, trying to find the last \, like in this example, could probably be made simpler by a call to reverse

Close, but why not rindex. Take this example:

$file = substr($path, 1 + rindex($path,'\\'));
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It finds the last \ in the string and asigns everything after that.

That said, I would definately use something like File::Basename if you plan on using this script more than once.

The 15 year old, freshman programmer,
Stephen Rawls