Usually if I want to do something like this, I use both the low-precedence and high-precedence operators, to explicitly and obviously indicate what is happening, as follows:

  opendir(PWD,"$next") && my @files = readdir PWD
      or die "Open \"$_\" failed: $!";
[download]

A side note: As a matter of good form, I don't declare lexically scoped variables within subexpressions, and especially not within conditionally executed ones, like you did with @files. In this specific example, I would not combine the readdir and openddir in one line.

Your second example I would seperate into two statements as jeroenes suggested above, but you can also do

s/test/whatever/, print;
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if you're really itching to put it all on one line. Or, if you prefer:

s/test/whatever/ => print;
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   MeowChow                                               
                print $/='"',(`$^X\144oc $^X\146aq1`)[-2]

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