I was thinking glob, which is what implements the above behaviour, but then got distracted and forgot to post. However, upon seeing this, I must recommend glob over the <> operator. For starters, it's way clearer. The <> operator is already overloaded for the much more common "read from filehandle" use, so people seeing this would be easily confused, or at least have to take a second or two to recall this odd usage.

Also, the <> operator has some weird properties when dealing with spaces and such where the glob function doesn't.

  @files = glob '*';
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