No, you shouldn't have to change anything.

Have you tried stepping-through with the debugger? Where exactly is it "hanging"? You might also want to try adding a couple of prints in there for debugging purposes.

Yet another approach is to present the to-be-searched paths on the command line. Swap

while (<STDIN>) {
  chomp;
[download]

with:

foreach(@ARGV) {
[download]

and invoke your script from the command line with: perl scriptname.pl c:\path1 c:\path2 ...

Both approaches work for me.