In my quest to amend an email conversion script, I've come across the following code to pull out files from a directory:- 
while ($file = <$dir\\*.txt>) {
  #do your stuff
}

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Whenever I have had to access files from a directory before I've used the approach:- 
opendir    ( DIR, $dir )      || die "Cannot open directory $dir: $!";
while ( defined( $file = readdir(DIR) ) ) {
  next if $file =~ /^\.\.?$/;      
  if ( $file =~/txt$/ ) {
    #do your stuff
  }
}
closedir DIR;

[download]
Benchmarking shows only a small difference in performance, with opendir the slightly better of the two.

All I want to know is - is there any other difference between the two approaches that I should take into account?

Or am I fussing over nothing? :-}

elbow

Update - I take back the slight difference part - benchmarking shows a huge difference between the two pieces of code on a directory with a lot of *.txt files in!

In reply to opendir or not? by elbow

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