Well, in building my reply, I just learned something. Linux lets you open a directory as a file without an error, but then you can't do anything with it.

Anyway, the answer you're looking for is perldoc -f opendir. This corresponds to the C library opendir/readdir/seekdir/telldir/rewinddir/scandir/closedir family of functions which operate on a DIR* struct, which is very different from a file handle. I think the error message tries to convey that with "dirhandle" language instead of "filehandle".

Meanwhile, I recommend Path::Tiny or Path::Class is you're doing any significant amount of work with browsing file trees. If you can't use modules, there's also the handy 'glob' function with the convenient built-in syntax of my @files= <$dir/*>; Note that that one returns full relative paths instead of just the file names, which is sometimes more useful (and sometimes not).

In reply to Re: "readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle" error? by NERDVANA
in thread "readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle" error? by Anonymous Monk

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