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";
    }
}
[download]

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.