• You are trying to read from a file name.

  No, I don't think so. This looks to me like the file globbing operator (same as glob). And this should work - once the syntax error after for is fixed. So rewriting a little bit:

  # added braces and changed variable name
  for my $filename (</home/www/*/logs/weekly>) {
    substr($filename,-7)=" ";
    print $filename;
  }
  [download]

• while(<>) # reads from STDIN

  and again no, this reads from the magic filehandle ARGV - which results in a read from STDIN when @ARGV is empty, otherwise it interprets the arguments in @ARGV as filenames and reads from them.

  while (<STDIN>) { # this reads from STDIN
     ...
  }
  [download]

  and you are right that <> is the best solution if you are trying to read from multiple files

-- Hofmator