my $img_dir = '../images';
opendir HOMEDIR, $img_dir or die "opendir failed: $!\n";
my @filenames = readdir HOMEDIR;
closedir HOMEDIR or die "closedir failed: $!\n";

open FIL, '>', '../pub/database.xml' or die "open failed: $!\n";
flock( FIL, 2 ) or die "flock failed: $!\n";

print FIL <<EOXML;
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<site>
EOXML

{
  my $path_to_imgs = '/images';
  my @f = @filenames;           # @f will be destroyed
  my $t = 1;
  use HTML::Entities;
  for my $filename ( map encode_entities( $_ ),
                     grep s/\.jpg$//i, @f ) {
    print FIL qq(<item id="$t" imageURL="$path_to_imgs/$filename" />\n);
    $t++;
  }
}

print FIL "</site>\n";

flock FIL, 8 or die "flock failed: $!\n";
close FIL    or die "close failed: $!\n";