Ahh well crafted my friend, another ++ vote.. It occurs to be in linux I might PIPE the result to ! -d or something , but I don't know about any Perl pipe.
TYVM
Comment on Re^2: How can I readdir and ! -d in one line
A perl equivalent (of sorts) might be to chain greps on different conditionals, but (IMHO) that's not particularly clearer in this case than simply having the one predicate step check both conditions (not-dir and starts with a wordchar) at the same time.
my @files = grep { ! -d qq{$myDir/$_} }
grep { /^\w/ }
readdir( I );