Perhaps stuffing the whole list into memory just to throw most of them away is making things slow (doesn't seem very likely with only 20,000 file names, but worth considering): 

    while( defined( $_ = readdir MYDIRHANDLE ) ) {
        push @aryFiles, $_ if /\.xml$/i;
    }
    closedir MYDIRHANDLE;
    #    ^^^ note this

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(:

I'd recommend the much simpler glob("*.xml"), but it appears that there are some alarming inefficiencies there that need investigation. |:

                - tye

In reply to Re: Filesystem: How to grab subset of directory structure (less RAM?) by tye
in thread Filesystem: How to grab subset of directory structure by P0w3rK!d

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