I'm definitely just beginning to get my head wrapped around perl, but I'm finally grasping many things that have eluded me until now. That said...I've managed to hack out a script that *almost* does what I want it to do. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

opendir(DIR,".") || die "couldn't open the directory!";
@files = readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

print 'There are ',scalar(@files)," files in the directory.\n";

foreach $file (@files) {
   print "Stored on the server as: $file\n";
   print "--------------------------------------------\n";
        open (CURRENT, "$file") || die "couldn't open the file!";
        while ($fileguts = <CURRENT>) {
        print "   $fileguts";
        }
   print "\n\n\n";
   close(CURRENT);
}

[download]

I'm running this in a directory of text files. As you can see, the result of this is how many files are in the directory and the contents of each file separated with a dashed line printed to screen. What I'd *like* to do is only have files that have filenames ending with *.dat to be involved.

I'm not sure if I'm on the right track or if there's a far better way to go about this.
A key concern: this'll need to work on both an NT box and a unix machine.

Any input is greatly appreciated.

In reply to filtering file names to be added to an array...maybe. by udigthis

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