I feel like I'm almost there:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $filename = $ARGV[0];
open(INFILE,  "<",  $filename) or die "Cannot open $ARGV[0]";

my(@fcont) = <INFILE>;

$dir =~ m/[a-z]:\\.*?\n/g;
         
foreach $line (@fcont) {
    
    if ($line =~ m/(New File|New Dir)\s+([0-9]+|[0-9].[0-9]\s[a-z]?)\s
++(.*?\n)/g) 
     {
         print join("|",$ARGV[0],$1,$dir,$2,$3);
     }
}
close( INFILE );
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but of course it tells me $line and $dir requires explict package name. What am I mising? This will pull out all entries that are New Dir or New File, but I was hoping to bring down my New Dir match so that each New File had its correpondinf directory

What am I mising?

You are missing my before $line after foreach. You should also declare $dir, but I do not see where this variable gets its value.

I wanted $dir to get its value from extracting text from the New Dir entry. For each new Dir there will be a x:\....\ string of text to denote a folder path, which for each line where there is New Dir match it assigns the value found to $dir, then for each corresponding line the print join prints the $dir value. Well that was the idea in theory. If I remove the $dir from the print join statement, it works. Ok so $line fixed. but still having probs with $dir. Does the $dir =~ not declare it as an assignment?

You are making life hard for yourself. Why not just use the robocopy option to include full pathnames in the logfile?

 /FP :: include Full Pathname of files in the output.
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Don't have that option. I'm not the creator of these logs files.

I think you want something like that:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $filename = $ARGV[0];
#$filename = 'robocopy_log.txt';

open my $hin, '<', $filename
    or die "Cannot open file /$filename/";

my @fcont = <$hin>;

my ( $dir, $txt, $nbytes, $file_found, $sav_dir, $sav_file );
foreach my $line (@fcont) {
    if ( $line =~ /New File|New Dir/ ) {
        ($dir)        = $line =~ /New Dir\s+(?:[0-9]+|[0-9]+?\.[0-9]+?
+\s[a-z])\s(.*)/;
        ($file_found) = $line =~ /New File\s+(?:[0-9]+|[0-9]+?\.[0-9]+
+?\s[a-z])\s(.*?)\s+?/;
        ( $txt, $nbytes ) = $line =~ /(New File|New Dir)\s+([0-9]+|[0-
+9]+?\.[0-9]+?\s[a-z])\s.*/;
        $sav_dir  = $dir        if $dir;
        $sav_file = $file_found if $file_found;
        $sav_dir  = !defined $sav_dir  ? q{} : $sav_dir;
        $sav_file = !defined $sav_file ? q{} : $sav_file;
        print join( "\t\t", $txt, $sav_dir, $nbytes, $sav_file ) . "\n
+";
    }
}

close $hin;
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Also look at this example, how to avoid $1, $2, ... matching parameters, you can directly assing the result to a list of variables

You also can try to put the three assignments in ony line, this is left as an exercise ;-)