Ywo comments. First, I'd guess that there's way too much code here. I'd be surprised it half of it couldn't be eliminated. I may post a followup on this later.

Second, I don't think this part could possibly work:

  35: my @disk = <FILE>;
  36: chomp @disk = <FILE>;
[download]

since @disk will always be empty. Perhaps you want chomp(my @disk = <FILE>) instead.

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Update: Well, I was wrong about lines 35-36 not possibly working! It turns out that line 36 is parsed so that the result of <FILE> is assigned to chomp, rather than to @disk! (That is, it is parsed as chomp(@disk) = <FILE>, not chomp(@disk = <FILE>).) In any event, the second assignment is useless, and the two lines should be replaced with one:

    chomp(my @disk = <FILE>);
[download]

In other news, I was right about there being too much code. I've cut copy_from_root from 98 lines to 26, and I'm about to move on to the rest of the program.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia