This approach is frowned upon in the general case, because if you follow symbolic links. If a chain of symbolic links ever gets back to above where you are in the the directory tree, you will have created a loop, and your program will never terminate.

update: Duh! I skimmed too much and missed the -l test. Sorry sporty, bad me. I guess after having seen half a dozen wrong solutions posted here over the years one starts to expect them to be all wrong. Which by extension is another reason to use File::Find, it offers a much higher level of conceptual chunking.

It might be something as simple as foo -> ../../../ but it might also be something more subtle: foo -> /bar/new/foo and something in /bar/new/foo points back here again. In my experience it's always¹ been something fairly obscure, always involving new versions of applications and new disks being added to the machine. After a few years, this sort of cruft builds up and makes the scenario inevitable.

The File::Find modules take care this problem into account, and can thereby save you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Maybe I should point out that I'm not pointing the bone at sporty, but rather warning those who'll see this in the future and think that this would be a better approach than to use standard modules, NIH syndrome and all that.

1. Always... well, this did happen to me once, a long time ago. It was a lesson learnt, and now I use File::Find.