A translation of sorts:

• If used in list context.... What this is saying is that readdir() can be used either to return one directory member at a time or all directory members at once. If you do @files=readdir(DIR) you get them all at once because Perl sees the "@" before "@files" and thinks list context. If you do $sFile=readder(DIR) you get them one at a time because Perl sees scalar context. readdir keeps track of which ones you've already retrieved so far
• you'd better prepend the directory.... readdir returns the local name of a file rather than the fully qualified path, e.g. "foo.txt" rather than "/home/joe/foo.txt".
• Otherwise, because we didn't chdir there... Making your code dependent on the current directory isn't normally a good idea. But if $some_dir just happened to be the current directory, then using the local name instead of the fully qualified path would just happen to work.

As for the code

# opens a "cursor" on the directory entries
# works kind of like open(...) but for directories rather
# than files

opendir(DIR, $some_dir) || die "can't opendir $some_dir: $!";

# calls readdir(DIR) in list context - so that means that
# all directory entries are returned at once.
# then it passes the array of local file names through grep

# grep selects members of an array based on the return
# value of the {...} bit.
#
# $_    - a member of the array returned by readdir(DIR)
#         i.e. the local name of a file in the directory $some_dir
#
# /^\./ - selects only local file names beginning with dots.
#         this is short for $_ =~ /^\./
#
# -f "$some_dir/$_"  - checks to see if the fully qualified path
#                      "$some_dir/$_" is an existing file.

@dots = grep { /^\./ && -f "$some_dir/$_" } readdir(DIR); 

# like close() but for directories

closedir DIR;
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Hope that helps, best, beth

Update: added explanation of grep {...} block

1. Opens the directory named $some_dir and associates it with the directory handle DIR
2. Gets a list of all filenames and passes that through a grep that:
   1. checks that the file name starts w/ a period (.)
   2. checks that the file name with the path appended on the front is a file
   and stores the results in an array
3. Closes the directory handle

Thanks I was looking to strip off the . and .. from the list returned as what I am wanting to do is travel down a directory tree opening files and checking to make sure they are valid, this is for a project I am working on to store results of tests into a database. I am on windows system so my filenames don't start with a period, I managed to get my list of directories now I would like to open the files within those directories but I don't think this is quite right.

opendir(DIR, "c:\\mlx\\") || die "can't opendir: $!";
  @list = grep { $_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..'&& $_ ne 'copy.pl' } 
  @list=readdir(DIR);
  
    foreach $name (@list)
    {
    print $name, "\n";
    opendir(DIR, $name);
    @files=readdir(DIR);
    foreach $file(@files){
    print "filename is ", $file, "\n";
    }

  
    #opendir(DIR, "$_")||die "Not able to open directory $!";
    @files=readdir(DIR);
    foreach(@files)
    {
    print  $_, "\n";
    }
}
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this runs but I its not giving me all the files. I have files in each directory it looks to be returning for only one of them.

You can easily modify your regex to match only entries that do not start a period (\^[^\.]\) to remove the current and parent directories from the list, but that is redundant with performing the file test -f, which returns false on folders. Do you want to collect folders as well as files as you traverse your tree, or are you only interested in checking file names in known directories? Removing the regular expression from you posted code will achieve the latter.