If you're on a *NIX system (and it looks like you are), I like using the find program to do the heavy lifting of locating all the files for you. It's pretty powerful and will handle additional complexity if your requirements ever expand beyond "files that end in .sas". You then feed the output of find to your Perl program, letting it concentrate on the actual searching.

find /cdw/home_dir/ -name "*.sas" | xargs perl yourprog.pl
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... where yourprog.pl looks something like:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @words = qw(foo bar baz etc.);

while (<>){
   for my $word (@words){
      print "Found $word in $ARGV\n" if (/\Q$word/);
   }
}
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