Hello Staralfur,

Another alternative is to use find with multiple parameters and traverse through your directories. But notice that on some systems (such as Cygwin), parentheses are necessary to make the set of extensions inclusive: my @files = `find $path \( -name '*.c' -o -name '*.txt'\)`;.

Sample of script (WRONG see bellow Update2 and Update3):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $path = shift || '.';

print Dumper traverse($path);

sub traverse {
    my ($path) = @_;

    my @files = `find $path -name '*.c' -o -name '*.txt'`;

    return if not -d $path;
    opendir my $dh, $path or die;
    while (my $sub = readdir $dh) {
        next if $sub eq '.' or $sub eq '..';
        traverse("$path/$sub");
    }
    close $dh;
    chomp @files;
    return \@files;
}

__DATA__

$ perl file.pl
$VAR1 = [
          './counts.txt',
          './file.txt',
          './sample.c',
          './testDir/anotherSample.c',
          './test.txt'
        ];
[download]

But to be 100% honest, I think I would have gone also with stevieb, more generic on OS system. But maybe you can come up with something different.

Update: Combining stevieb solution and File::Find:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
use Data::Dumper;

my @dirs = @ARGV ? @ARGV : ('.');

my @list;
find( sub{
    push @list, $File::Find::name if -f $_
    && $_ =~ /(?:\btest\b|\bsample\b|\bChris\b)/ }, @dirs );

print Dumper \@list;

__DATA__

$ perl file.pl
$VAR1 = [
          './test.pl~',
          './sample.c',
          './test.txt~',
          './test.pl',
          './test.txt'
        ];
[download]

Update2: Combining stevieb solution and recursive search on directories:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @files;
my $path = shift || '.';
print Dumper traverse($path);

sub traverse {
    my ($path) = @_;

    return if not -d $path;
    opendir my $dh, $path or die;
    while (my $sub = readdir $dh) {
        next if $sub eq '.' or $sub eq '..';
    push @files, "$path/$sub"
        if ("$path/$sub" =~ /(?:\btest\b|\banotherSample\b|\bsample\b)
+/);
    traverse("$path/$sub");
    }
    close $dh;
    return \@files;
}

__DATA__

$ perl file.pl
$VAR1 = [
          './test.pl~',
          './sample.c',
          './test.txt~',
          './testDir/anotherSample.c',
          './test.pl',
          './test.txt'
        ];
[download]

Update3: :Another alternative is to use find with multiple parameters and traverse through your directories. But notice that on some systems (such as Cygwin), parentheses are necessary to make the set of extensions inclusive: my @files = `find $path \( -name '*.c' -o -name '*.txt'\)`;.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $path = shift || '.';

my @files = `find $path -name '*.c' -o -name '*.txt'`;

chomp @files;
print Dumper \@files;

__DATA__

$ perl file.pl
$VAR1 = [
          './test.pl~',
          './sample.c',
          './test.txt~',
          './testDir/anotherSample.c',
          './test.pl',
          './test.txt'
        ];
[download]

Hope this helps.