... if he wrote this perl script to load the contents of said directory into an array, that the script would have a huge memory foot print.
Have you determined whether an occassional huge memory footprint is actually significant in the system you're building? Reading the directory into an array is simple to implement and test. If the CGI is going to be invoked relatively infrequently (e.g., a few times a minute) on a machine with adequate memory, the impact of the footprint might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Smaller footprint alternatives are more difficult to implement, and might be more compute intensive.
