I have a need for a function in my program that would return back all xml-files it can find. The function needs to be recursive, because it goes through directory like this: 
archive
.2005
..12
...420.xml
..11
...419.xml
..10
...418.xml
...417.xml
.2004
..9
...416.xml
..7
...415.xml
.2003
..5
...414.xml
..4
...413.xml
..2
...412.xml

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So directory 'archive' has subdirs based on years and they have subdirs based on months, latter ones then have these xml-files that i would like to read on to array. When the funtion has read recursively all subdirs and pushed xml-files to array, it then returns that array. Where i'm facing problem, is with this code that i've copied from web and modified to suit my needs: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

my @files;
loopDir('./');
print "found xml-files $#files..\n";

sub loopDir {

local ($dir) = @_;
chdir $dir or die "Cannot chdir to $dir\n";
local(*DIR);
opendir DIR, '.';

while ($f=readdir(DIR)) {

        next if $f =~ /^\./;
        push @files, $dir . '/' . $f if $f =~ /.*\.xml$/;

        if (-d $f) {
                &loopDir($f);
        }
}
closedir(DIR);
chdir("..");

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There doesn't seem to be any other way to introduce that '@files' array, other than higher in the program. I would like this loopDir function to return it, not modify elsewhere introduced array. Like this i mean: my @files = loopDir('./');

In reply to Recursive file search by mellin

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