The easiest way is to use the glob function to let Perl find the file for you:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# this is just so that glob() whitespace handling is sane
use File::Glob qw(bsd_glob);

my $fname = "empty";

my @found_files;
while (! @found_files){
       print "Please enter Filename: ";
       chomp($fname = <STDIN>);

       @found_files = glob( "/Users/johnsmith/data/$fname*" );
       if (@found_files != 1) {
           if (@found_files == 0) {
               print "File '/Users/johnsmith/data/$fname*' does not ex
+ist.\n\n";
           } else {
               print "There are multiple files matching '/Users/johnsm
+ith/data/$fname*':\n";
               print "$_\n" for @found_files;
           };
       };
}
print "I have found this '$found_files[0]' in your directory\n\n";
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Thanks!

I really appreciate the feed back.

Rather than searching the list of files, you could just check if the file exists. This approach would eliminate a lot of testing and guessing.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $path = '/Users/johnsmith/data';
my $fname;

{
    print "Please enter a filename: ";
    chomp($fname = <STDIN>);
    last if -f "$path/$fname";
    print "File does not exist!\n";
    redo;
}
print "I have found '$fname' in '$path'.\n";
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Note: Just in case you aren't trying to play guessing games with the user, you might want to consider displaying the list of available filenames. Reading up on globbing with the '<*.c>' operator or the glob operator itself should prove useful for that.

Thanks for the advice.

I am working on adding a file display portion to my script before I ask for the file name.

As stated earlier I really appreciate the advice give so far. Now for the followup question. I am using this script to clean out directories.

For this example I have 4 files in the /User/jsmith/data directory named test1-4. I want to delete all four of them so far I have the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use File::Glob qw(bsd_glob);
use File::Path;

my $fname = "empty";

my @found_files;
my @found_files1;

while (! @found_files) {
        print "Please enter the file name: ";
        chomp($fname = <STDIN>);

        @found_files = glob( "/Users/jsmith/data/$fname*" );
        if (@found_files != 1) {
                print "File does not exist!";
                                };
                };
print "The following files have been deleted: \n";
print "$_\n" for @found_files;
while (@found_files != 0) {
        rmtree (@found_files);
        @found_files = glob( "/Users/jsmith/data/$fname*");
};
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Is there a more effective way to use the rmtree to delete multiple directories other than using a while loop

I'm a little confused by your question. Are you trying to remove directories, or just some files within a directory? If you are just trying to remove individual files that match the specified input pattern, you probably could use rmtree from File::Path to remove your list of files. But I believe the most customary usage of rmtree is to remove directories. Here is a quote from the documentation:

the rmtree function provides a convenient way to delete an entire directory subtree from the filesystem, much like the Unix command rm -r

It is probably more appropriate in your case to use unlink. You could replace your while loop with:

unlink @found_files;
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