A translation of sorts:

• If used in list context.... What this is saying is that readdir() can be used either to return one directory member at a time or all directory members at once. If you do @files=readdir(DIR) you get them all at once because Perl sees the "@" before "@files" and thinks list context. If you do $sFile=readder(DIR) you get them one at a time because Perl sees scalar context. readdir keeps track of which ones you've already retrieved so far
• you'd better prepend the directory.... readdir returns the local name of a file rather than the fully qualified path, e.g. "foo.txt" rather than "/home/joe/foo.txt".
• Otherwise, because we didn't chdir there... Making your code dependent on the current directory isn't normally a good idea. But if $some_dir just happened to be the current directory, then using the local name instead of the fully qualified path would just happen to work.

As for the code

# opens a "cursor" on the directory entries
# works kind of like open(...) but for directories rather
# than files

opendir(DIR, $some_dir) || die "can't opendir $some_dir: $!";

# calls readdir(DIR) in list context - so that means that
# all directory entries are returned at once.
# then it passes the array of local file names through grep

# grep selects members of an array based on the return
# value of the {...} bit.
#
# $_    - a member of the array returned by readdir(DIR)
#         i.e. the local name of a file in the directory $some_dir
#
# /^\./ - selects only local file names beginning with dots.
#         this is short for $_ =~ /^\./
#
# -f "$some_dir/$_"  - checks to see if the fully qualified path
#                      "$some_dir/$_" is an existing file.

@dots = grep { /^\./ && -f "$some_dir/$_" } readdir(DIR); 

# like close() but for directories

closedir DIR;
[download]

Hope that helps, best, beth

Update: added explanation of grep {...} block

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