Your precedence problem goes away with a little untangling. Move the error handling for opendir() in closer to the call, rather than out past the readdir(). Here's I'd code it. 
for my $next (@ARGV){
  opendir(PWD, "$next") or die "$next: $!";
  my @files = readdir(PWD) or die "$next: $!";
  closedir(PWD);

  print join("\n", @files), "\n";
}

[download]
(Updated to add error handling after readdir(), too.)

Or, if you really want to use precedence, and if you want to ignore non-directories in @ARGV, consider 

for my $next (@ARGV) {
    opendir(PWD, "$next") and do {
        my @files = readdir(PWD) or die "$next: $!";
        closedir(PWD);
        print join("\n", @files), "\n";
    }
}

[download]

In reply to Re: and this or that by dws
in thread and this or that by mkmcconn

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