The sample solution I offered is not in itself recursive, although it could be the guts of a recursive solution.

given/when is Perl's switch statement support which was introduced with 5.10. A switch statement is really just syntactic sugar for a set of related if statements so you can replace the when blocks with if blocks:

for my $result ($lsResults1, $lsResults2) {
    for (keys %$result) {
        if ($_ eq 'file') {
            print "Filename: $result->{file}{path}\n";
            print "    Size: $result->{file}{size}\n";
        } elsif ($_ eq 'directory') {
            my $value = ref $result->{directory};

            if ($value eq 'ARRAY') {
                for my $entry (@{$result->{directory}}) {
                    print "Directory: $entry->{path}\n";
                }
            } elsif ($value eq 'HASH') {
                print "Directory: $result->{directory}{path}\n";
            }
        }
    }
}
[download]

Thanks Grandfather! It works nicely. I am doing some testing on it right now.

There's a point in the directory (where I go higher up in directory) where I see this messageBad index while coercing array into hash

What's a good way to handle that message?

Output:

$ ./tst-loopthrough2.pl --dir /work/eng
Bad index while coercing array into hash at ./tst-loopthrough2.pl line
+ 101.
$ ./tst-loopthrough2.pl --dir /work/eng/feeds
Directory: /work/eng/feeds
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care
$ ./tst-loopthrough2.pl --dir /work/eng/feeds/customer_care
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/abc
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/def
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/test
$ ./tst-loopthrough2.pl --dir /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/test
Filename: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/test/q_data_20111023.dat
    Size: 379085
Directory: /work/eng/feeds/customer_care/test
[download]

The sample code I provided is fewer than 100 lines including the sample hash initialisation. That is less than the line containing the error according to your error message so I can't easily tell where the error is happening. Perhaps you'd like to modify the data in my sample code to reproduce the error then post that?

True laziness is hard work