Actually, using ls has some advantages. For instance, the opendir/readdir solution presented by jwkrahn below will try to open the current and parent directory as if they were files. A plain 'ls' will not return any names starting with a dot. The equivalent of 
  my @files = `ls $dir`;

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is 
  my @files;
  {
      opendir my $dh, $dir or die;
      @files = grep {!/^\./} readdir $dh;
      closedir $dh;
  }

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As for using cat to read a file, it's something I do often. It's simple. It's a short one liner. Doing it in pure Perl requires several lines, or something cryptic. 
    my $info = do {local (@ARGV, $/) = $file; <>};  # Cryptic
    
    # 7 Lines.
    my $info;
    {
        open my $fh, "<", $file or die;
        local $/;
        $info = <$fh>;
        close $fh;
    }

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In reply to Re^2: greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?) by JavaFan
in thread greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?) by jperlq

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