In the final program or script, you probably won't list all those file names, but you'll read them e.g. from a config file or even calculate them, which more or less will lead to a loop, like this

use 5.011;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $inputPathPrefix = "C:/Temp/xml";
my @inputfiles;
for my $i (1..7) {
    push(@inputfiles, $inputPathPrefix . "/test${i}.xml");
}
say Dumper(\@inputfiles);
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gives

$VAR1 = [
          'C:/Temp/xml/test1.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test2.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test3.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test4.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test5.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test6.xml',
          'C:/Temp/xml/test7.xml'
        ];
[download]

In a loop, push is more or less the only method.

BTW, you can also push multiple values in one go, see push