Take a look at File::Spec's no_upwards method. It lets you (portably) skip the dot directories:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Spec;

my @x;
opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "Can't open directory $dir: $!";
eval { @x = File::Spec->no_upwards(readdir(DIR)); };
closedir(DIR);
print "@x\n";
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Best, beth