jdporter,
If you want scary action at a distance that is subject to break if the implementation changes:

find(sub { ...; --$fnlinks or last Proc_Top_Item; }, $dir);
[download]

I found this by looking under the File::Find covers.

Now that I think about it, this sounds like the sanest solution. Of course I mean a patch to File::Find where you can either set some flag or pass in a closure that evaluates to true to determine if it can terminate early which is checked each loop.