You don't show any (relevant) code, so I have to guess where your problem could lie. See perlvar on @ARGV and/or Getopt::Long for how to parse command line switches. Also see opendir and readdir or Path::Class for how to list files in one directory. See File::Find for how to find files below a given directory. Alternatively see App::Ack for a reimplementation of the grep program in Perl.

this is the code I've been using

@files = <*>;
 foreach $file (@files) {
   print $file . "\n";
 }
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You can include any path in your filesystem between the <> marks. For example, say your web site is in the /var/www/htdocs/ directory and you want a list of all the files:

Or if you just want a list of the files with the extension .html:

however, where it says I can include any path, it doesn't work as it still only lists the directory that the .pl file is in Sorry for notposting the code :)

I forgot a very simple function that you might want to use to replace <...>: File::Glob::bsd_glob - it works just like <...> but it accepts the directory to glob as a parameter and understands whitespace in directory names.

glob and grep complement each other. glob is for finding filesystem entries (think "names"), and grep is for searching lists (like lines in a file). If you don't use the grep command line utility, then your Perl program will need to combine both. Use bsd_glob to find the files that are of interest, and then use grep to find the lines in those files.

So the correct procedure would be to ask the user to specify the directory they wish to search in

Use Glob to list all files in the directory? Or should I use glob to search for 'monk' and glob would bring back a list of files with 'monk' in them?

then use Grep to specify which lines the word 'monk' is on?

What is bsd_glob..

Sorry for the completely noob like comments, but I'm a complete noob so it's to be expected.

Hey, update here This is how far I've got so far

 #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $directory = 'C:\Users\Anthony\music';

    opendir (DIR, $directory) or die $!;

while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) {

        print "$file\n";

    }
 closedir(DIR);
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This lets me open any directory, but how do I make it so the users can select the directory when the programme is ran? Also, I found this code, whcih appears to do what I want, but I can't seem to merge it with what I already have

 $ grep "redeem reward" /home/tom/*.txt
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but how do I make it so the users can select the directory when the programme is ran?

One way is to pass it in on the command line (see shift):

use strict;
use warnings;

my $directory = shift;
print "dir=$directory\n";   # just for debug
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Run your program as:

$ ./838783.pl /foo/bar
dir=/foo/bar
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I tried the first paragraph of code

use strict;
use warnings;

my $directory = shift;
print "dir=$directory\n";   # just for debug
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I got this error use of uninitilised value $directory in concatenation (.)or string at.......... sayingline 6 fault in code, but dont know why... bah this stuff confuses me Do I add the code you posted to the code I already have or is it stand alone? If so, what did you mean by run my file as the second bit of code?