glob might help. It lets you find files that match a given pattern in a folder (it's not recursive). Something like: my @from = glob( quotemeta($base)."*.txt") where quotemeta escapes the special characters in $base, so that they are taken litteraly and not interpreted as pattern metacharacters.

This returns a list of files though, so I stored it inside an array (@from) instead of a scalar ($from). You can then use a foreach loops to process the files individually