Thanks for all your help on this one and just shows again the TIMTOWTDI ness of PERL. This problem was orginally a a get out of jail quick card and did help me locate what I wanted and come up with a soloution so job done

But for anyone interested there was a directory called "Found to be Obsolete" and I think this is what clouded my judgement, it just looked like it should be in an error message. Might use

 open FILE, $dir.$file or die "$!  <<<<$file>>>>";
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Just so I know its me thats put it there. Also the irony which struck me after banging my head on the wall and spotting my failing test was that I could have used

    if ($file =~ /\.pm/){
        #do something
    }
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I would have achived the same, but its become a habit for me to use the '.' and '..' approach. We live and learn.

Thanks for the help everyone