# ... Create a regular expression to represent the wildcard string normally submitted to glob my $MatchPatternRegex = "ABC\\_XYZ\\_.{9}\\.xml"; if (opendir CURDIR, $directoryName) { my $nextFilename = readdir CURDIR; while ($nextFilename) { if ($nextFilename =~ /$MatchPatternRegex/) { # ... Do your stuff here } } closedir CURDIR; }