Well, you asked a simple question and got some useful Perl answers. I would like to add a small way-of-thinking that is not restricted to Perl.

Deleting is permanent, renaming is not. Think about your task amd what could go wrong. Is your data important enough to make a backup? Would it be easy to, instead of deleting files on the fly, moving them to a designated directory? These files can then be manually checked, manually deleted or bulk deleted at set periods if it is a regular job.

Then again, maybe you just want to delete them :)

<a href="http://www.graq.co.uk">Graq</a>