<*> (file globbing) used to spawn a csh process (and used to do some other horrible thing on Windows), but now (as of 5.6?) uses File::Glob. I still avoid it, because (open|read|close)dir with grep provides better file and pattern matching capabilities. And maybe I just find the syntax ambiguous (I confuse it with reading lines of a filehandle), which is maybe just my own prejudice. I'm curious as to what others think of file globbing vs. readdir...