glob is not recursive, so it's kind of like asking what kind of socket wrench you need to use instead of a screwdriver to drive in a screw (i.e. similar jobs but different kinds of tools). You can of course reimplement your own recursive routines on top of it but then you're reinventing the wheel that other modules already implement.

While File::Find may seem "longer to code" it's not that bad; you may find File::Find::Rule more to your liking, but that will introduce an external dependency (albeit a pure Perl one so it's not that bad all things considered).

Never used the other module you mention so I probably can't really comment one way or the other.

Update: Let me nitpick myself and amend my first statement to glob is not recursive in and of itself but it will handle multiple directory levels if you give it a path with directory separators. If you really want to you can keep getting deeper and deeper with */*, */*/*, etc until you get back an empty list, but again that's reinventing wheels already solved better elsewhere.

The reason File::Find::Rule keeps coming up is that it would be the less work by far. For example,

foreach my $file (`find $dir -type f -name "*.txt"`)
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would become

foreach my $file (find->file()->name('*.txt')->in('.'))
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I'd use File::Find. It's a core module, so it will always be anywhere you find Perl. It takes more code to write, but it's still not that bad:

sub find_text_files {
    my $dir = shift;

    my @text_files;
    my $tf_finder = sub {
        return if ! -f;
        return if ! /\.txt\z/;
        push @text_files, $File::Find::name;
    };
    find( $tf_finder, $dir );

    return @text_files;
}
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(Not tested.)

It would be a little easier using File::Find::Rule, but that's not core.

The Perl core module, File::Find, is similar to Unix find in that it does a recursive search.

You are right: as of 5.10.0, File::Util is not a core module.

Another module to consider is File::Find::Rule, which has a simpler interface, IMO, than File::Find, although it is not a core module.

The answer might also depend on what you plan to do with the list of files, once you have that list.

If you have other uses of backticks in your program, I would strongly encourage you to replace them with more robust solutions. I wish I could point you to a good writeup of the best practices in this regard, but unfortunately I don't know of any right now.

A related question: Has anyone benchmarked these against one another?

I am considering using either File::Util or File::Find to recursively walk a directory tree pulling out file metadata (size, mtime, etc.) with stat(), but I need to use the fastest possible method. Anyone know from previous experience which one that would be?

Thanks,
- Zen