sysplex file system handling in Perl

I'm looking for feedback for how I "solved" a problem in the module that 
walks the directory path starting at the left "root" down to the current 
directory on sysplexed systems.  Did I do the right thing?

The problem is that the literal string "$SYSNAME" in a directory path 
appears to the code to be a symbolic link to itself.  If one wants to 
walk $SYSNAME/tmp, for example, one keeps recursing, adding $SYSNAMEs on 
to the front of the path until our fail-safe limit is reached.  This 
would like something like

$SYSNAME/$SYSNAME/.../$SYSNAME /tmp

never reaching the tmp.

What I ended up doing is to replace all instances of $SYSNAME/foo simply 
by /foo, for all foo when $SYSNAME is a symbolic link.  Then the above 
would resolve simply to /tmp.  This seems to work on the system we are 
testing on.

Is there a better way of handling this?  Perhaps $SYSNAME eventually 
evaluates to a particular thing.  Is there a way to do that evaluation 
from C code?