Am I doing this right?

Here's a couple of ways you can go:

# modification to code you already have....
while( $file=readdir BIN ){
         push @array,$file; 
}
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# a slightly different play....
# delete the while loop altogether and...
@array = readdir BIN ;
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Keep in mind you are going to have the "." and ".." directory entries (current working directory and parent directory respectively) in your list and you need to have logic to eliminate those.

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $dir = "/root/dir";
opendir(BIN, $dir) or die "Can't open $dir: $!";
my @array = grep { -T "$dir/$_" } readdir BIN;
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you can use the glob function:

 perl -e 'my @arr=glob ("*.*");print "$_\n" for (@arr)'
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HTH

citromatik

Update: Or even more compressed

Update2: And lets add the test fot text files:

perl -e 'for (glob ("*.*")){print "$_\n" if (-T $_);}'
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For portability, you should get out of the habit of thinking of "*.*" as meaning "all entries in a directory." Just use "*" instead.

On Un*x varieties including Linux and MacOS X, the period is just another character which might be in a filename. On those platforms, "*.*" finds only those entries that just happen to include at least one period.

Windows thankfully expects "*" to mean "*.*", so using a single star parameter to glob() is portable on Windows and Un*x varieties both.

my @subdirectories =
   grep { not /^\.\.?$/ }
   grep { -d }
   glob("*");
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my @files =
   grep { -f }
   glob("*");
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There is also a -T check which sniffs the head of a file for anything that doesn't smell like text, but I tend not to trust that kind of contents-check. It's not sufficiently clear if it would say true or false for a few UTF-8 or Latin high-bit characters, which I would still call a "text" file.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

Funny how you and Argel are slicing the Camel's hair over glob and file systems :-)

I would say, for portablitiy "get out of the bad habit of using glob" to get a list of files, since glob - what do the docs say?

In list context, returns a (possibly empty) list of filename expansions on the value of EXPR such as the standard Unix shell /bin/csh would do. In scalar context, glob iterates through such filename expansions, returning undef when the list is exhausted.

There. That dratted csh - glob clearly has a UNIX bias. To know what glob really does, you have to know how the filename expansion of csh works - it uses the shell's wildcard syntax to filter filenames, not perl regular expressions. That's enough reason for me to almost never use glob.

So - for sake of portability use opendir and readdir.

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Except *.* is not portable either as it does not match UNIX hidden files -- files and directories that begin with a dot. In shells I usually use '.??*' to hit those (where the '??' is a kludge to make sure I avoid '.' and '..' -- the current and parent directory).

Now that I think about it even on Windows files are not required to have extensions. Some examples are %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and the registry hive files.

Or, even more compact way to use glob,

my $dir = "/path/to"; # or however you initialize

my @array = <$dir/*.txt>;
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use FileSystemObjects::Directory;

my $d = FileSystemObjects::Directory->new( '/root/dir' );
my @f = $d->files( -mask => "*.txt" );
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#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $somedirectory = "/root/dir/";
my $files = dirlist($someDirectory);

foreach my $fileInDirectory (@$files) {
        dosomething($fileInDirectory);
}


sub dirlist {
        my $dir = shift;
        my @filelist;
        opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "can't opendir $dir: $!";
        while (defined(my $file = readdir(DIR))) {

                # Skip "." and ".."
                next if ($file =~ /^\.\.?$/);
                push(@filelist, $file);

        }
        closedir(DIR);
        return \@filelist;
}
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#!/usr/bin/perl
$dir = "/root/dir";
opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "Can't open $dir: $!";
my @files = grep { -T $_ } readdir DIR;
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