On Windows,"\" is the path seperator. A file name can't contain that character, so you won't encounter it unless it means a depth transition in the stack. Same goes for "/" on Unix. The tricky part with Windows would be a rooted path like "c:\\". For that you could count occurrences of "\+",although I believe that ActivePerl translates the seperators to "/" for portability with Unix.

The "width first" traversal of the directory tree doesn't matter in the code I gave. The path seperator count will be the same between peer directories, thus their difference will be zero, and we will add zero to the depth counter. This also works for transitions up the stack, since that difference will be negative.