If I intuit your intent properly, there are two changes you need to make:
  1. =foreach needs to be foreach. You have made a syntax error that makes the interpreter think you are entering a documentation mode (see perlpod), thus no useful error message.
  2. Rather than <*>, which operates as a glob, you mean <>, which reads off STDIN.
So a functional version of your code might be 
@files = <>;
chomp @files; # Since there are trailing newlines
foreach $file (@files) {
    if (-f $file) {
        print "This is a file: " . $file."\n";
    }
    if (-d $file) {
        print "\n\nThis is a directory: " . $file."\n";
    }
}

[download]
or, if I wrote it, 
use strict;
use warnings; 

my @files = <>;
chomp @files;
foreach my $file (@files) {
    if (-f $file) {
        print "This is a file: $file\n";
    }
    if (-d $file) {
        print "\n\nThis is a directory: $file\n";
    }
}

[download]
What materials are you using to learn Perl? There are a number of great resources, including some free ones. For thorough coverage of available learning resources, see http://learn.perl.org.

Update: Corrected omitted chomp.

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

In reply to Re: How to read files in a directory, directory path to be given through CMD by kennethk
in thread How to read files in a directory, directory path to be given through CMD by ckj

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