#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use File::Slurp;

my $abs_loc = '/path/to/my/xml/files';

opendir(DIR,$abs_loc) or die($!);
my @xml_files = grep { /\.xml$/i and -f } readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

for (@xml_files){
   my $xml_content = File::Slurp::slurp("$abs_loc/$_");
   # ...
   print STDERR "$xml_content\n";
}