Traditionally, "the shell" does all the wildcard expansion, except on Windows. If you want to find files based on some wildcard expression, you can use the built-in glob function, the core module File::Find or File::Find::Rule if you want to write the search criteria in Perl.

Using glob() is the easiest way if you just want to search one directory for files specified by extension:

use strict;
use File::Glob qw(bsd_glob); # switch on sane whitespace semantics for
+ glob
my @files = glob('*.xml');

print "I found the following files:\n";
print "$_\n" for @files;
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If you want to use File::Find, because you want to search a whole directory tree, it's also easy:

use strict;
use File::Find;

my @files;
find(sub { push @files, $File::Find::name }, '.');
print "I found the following files:\n";
print "$_\n" for @files;
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use File::Slurp;

my $abs_loc = '/path/to/my/xml/files';

opendir(DIR,$abs_loc) or die($!);
my @xml_files = grep { /\.xml$/i and -f } readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

for (@xml_files){
   my $xml_content = File::Slurp::slurp("$abs_loc/$_");
   # ...
   print STDERR "$xml_content\n";
}
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