thanks plenty to think about here, some background info, i am loading c5k filenames as an initialisation process of a larger app, so perhaps File::Basename is a better way to go currently I do this ( i cant  `ls -1` as ls borks with too many arguments error)

my @teststr = `find $filearea -name "*.txt" -ls`;
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the current design probably isnt great, but Id be interested in hearing opinions on the relative speed of the different solutions: e.g. is a system call likely to be more expensive than the module? ill try and do some benchmarking myself thanks