Is this a limitation?
No, it's a bug in your code. :-(
As Bill mentioned, the File::Find module is made for recursing through directories. It still might be useful for you to know what's going wrong, though.
sub replaceEkstros{
my $startDir = shift;
# make an object out of the directory opendir DIR,$startDir || die $!;
Filehandles and dirhandles are global, so each time this sub is called, DIR is closed and re-opened on a new directory. To avoid that, pass a scalar to opendir() instead of a literal name. When a scalar is passed as the first parameter to open() or opendir(), it is used as the name of the filehandle/dirhandle to open. Likewise with readdir(), <>, read() and other functions that take filehandle/dirhandle parameters.
my $dh = $startDir; $dh =~ s/\W/_/g; # Transform all non-alphanumerics to _
opendir $dh, $startDir || die $!;
while (my $entry = readdir($dh)) {
... and so on.
sherm--
