Hello, ++toolic already pointed out the error in your code. Here are a couple of other observations:

• You don't need to worry about the size of the array. Perl handles that.

  for my $file (@files) {
      # Perl will exit the loop when the array has been processed
  }
  [download]

• You don't need to shell out to delete files. See unlink and rmdir and File::Path::remove_tree.

  use File::Path 'remove_tree';
  
  for my $file (@files) {
      unlink($file) if -f $file;
      remove_tree($file) if -d $file;
  }
  [download]

• Consider using bsd_glob from File::Glob instead of just glob to get the contents of a directory.
  
  
• Yes, the first worker to finish will get the next job.
  
  
• It's probably not an optimization to parallelize file deletions as the workers can likely only access the filesystem serially anyway (I am not an expert on that).
  
  
• You will often have conditions that must be met before you want to delete a file, e.g. the file is not empty, or is older than a certain date, etc. For finding files conditionally, see Path::Iterator::Rule.

Hope this helps!

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