Try replacing the following two lines and everything below them:

# open xml file to write
open(FIL,">../pub/database.xml");
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my $img_dir = '../images';
opendir HOMEDIR, $img_dir or die "opendir failed: $!\n";
my @filenames = readdir HOMEDIR;
closedir HOMEDIR or die "closedir failed: $!\n";

open FIL, '>', '../pub/database.xml' or die "open failed: $!\n";
flock( FIL, 2 ) or die "flock failed: $!\n";

print FIL <<EOXML;
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<site>
EOXML

{
  my $path_to_imgs = '/images';
  my @f = @filenames;           # @f will be destroyed
  my $t = 1;
  use HTML::Entities;
  for my $filename ( map encode_entities( $_ ),
                     grep s/\.jpg$//i, @f ) {
    print FIL qq(<item id="$t" imageURL="$path_to_imgs/$filename" />\n
+);
    $t++;
  }
}

print FIL "</site>\n";

flock FIL, 8 or die "flock failed: $!\n";
close FIL    or die "close failed: $!\n";
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{
  my ( $re, %c2e, $num_ent );
  INIT {
    %c2e =
      (
       '&' => 'amp' ,
       '>' => 'gt'  ,
       '<' => 'lt'  ,
       '"' => 'quot',
       "'" => 'apos',
      );

    $re = qr/[^\n\r\t !\#\$%\(-;=?-~]/;

    $num_ent = sub { sprintf '#x%X', ord( $_[ 0 ] ) };
  }

  sub encode_entities {
    my $string = shift;
    $string =~ s/($re)/sprintf '&%s;', $c2e{$1} || $num_ent->( $1 )/ge
+;
    return $string;
  }
}
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