I have a directory with 100,000 file entries. I want to pull out 5 filenames in no particular order. What's a quick way to do this?

One thing I can think of is using readdir in non list context. By comparison, reading a directory in list context can take a long time (a few seconds).
Maybe something like.. 

my $abs_d = './';
my @f;
opendir(DIR,$abs_d) or die;
for my $filename ( readdir(DIR) ){
   next if $filename=~/^\.+$/;
   push @f, $filename;
   last if $#f == 4;
}

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Maybe there's some other interesting way to do this?

In reply to quick way to read a few directory entries of many by leocharre

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