In the spirit of thinking outside the box. do the file numbers have to be sequential or start at 1? When I've needed to produce unique files within a directory, it's often been sufficient to use the current time as part of the filename, viz: 
    $name = 'foo_' . time() . '.bar';
or
    my($sec, $min, $hr, $day, $mon, $year) = (gmtime)[0..5];
    $name = sprintf("foo_%04d%02d%02d.%02d%02d%02d.bar",
        $year + 1900, $mon + 1, $day, $hr, $min, $sec);

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As long as you don't try to create more than one file per second, this will produce a new filename every time.

In reply to Re: Reading directories and parsing standard names by kjherron
in thread Reading directories and parsing standard names by Amoe

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