Depeding on how long you intend to spend doing stuff in each directory, it might be a good idea to do a chdir into that directory. This would avoid running into problems like the one you just had.

This is one of those philosofical issues, like what's best:

• relative links
• absolute urls

Each person has a particular way of doing things, but I just tend to think its a matter of what makes things clearer. In your case, it could be:

if (-f "$path/$leaf") {
}

# or simply 

chdir($path) || warn();
if (-d $leaf) {
}
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cheers!