Unfortunately, it isn't. It's actually a little slower on my desktop Sun and horrendous on my older win98 PC. On the latter it processed 10,000 files in 13 minutes, which is nearly twice as slow as the original program (7 mins). The similar contruct  while (<*.log>) was even slower on both platforms (Sun/old PC). And here I was thinking that this wasn't a Perl problem. It isn't, really, but it is apparently always possible to make a bad situation worse. :)