That has the disadvantage of potentially using a lot of memory if there are many files in the directory (the globbing solutions, and solutions that use readdir in list context all suffer from this).

I would use something like:

    my $cnt = 0;
    local $_;
    chdir "/home/a" or die "chdir: $!";
    opendir my $dh => "." or die "opendir: $!";
    -f && /\.txt$/ && $cnt ++ while defined ($_ = readdir $dh);
    closedir $dh;
[download]

Abigail