I'm not understanding why readdir wont work in my case? The error is being thrown when the file in @files is being opened.

Why not ? use my solutions?

Have you read readdir?

Its a very short read (only "79" words) and it explains exactly your case

You're not alone in this, practically 99% of all questions about readdir are this same question

Would you like to read readdir now, or simply start using something more convenient like glob, or better yet Path::Tiny?

Yes I read readdir, I'm assuming "file testing the return values out of a readdir" is my case of why I can't use it? I used glob like you said. No more errors, but I get no output to STDOUT. I placed "print "$file\n" at the end of my first for loop and I see the files are being iterated through, but the guts of the script where I'm trying to find names and object-groups is not showing any output.

Yes I read readdir, I'm assuming "file testing the return values out of a readdir" is my case of why I can't use it?

Yes, that part, if you're reading from "Foo/" getting a file of "Bar" and then you try to open "Bar" its not going to work as you need to open "Foo/Bar"

used glob like you said. No more errors, but I get no output to STDOUT. I placed "print "$file\n" at the end of my first for loop and I see the files are being iterated through, but the guts of the script where I'm trying to find names and object-groups is not showing any output.

This is where subroutines play important part. Consider this version

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If NaNamesConfMod() isn't working, there is no need to try to debug all the other parts, just  NaNamesConfMod( [  "test data" ] ); sub NaNamesConfMod{... }