I'd use opendir() and readdir(). I'd not trust glob() to Do The Right Thing on, eg, VMS and RISC OS. Also, if you previously foudn that globbing didn't work on Windows, then you already have an example of a platform that glob() isn't portable for! Perhaps it was a particular version of Windows, or a particular version of perl, but if you want to be platform independent, then you need to take that in to account.