Perl's chdir() has the unfortunate problem of being very, very, very global. If any part of your program calls chdir() or if any library you use calls chdir(), it changes the current working directory for the whole program. File::chdir gives you an alternative, $CWD and @CWD. These two variables combine all the power of chdir(), File::Spec and Cwd. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-chdir/