There is another way to do this, I find it a lot easier to use glob() to get a list of files.

my @files = glob("$dir/*.txt");
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@files then contains all the files that match the filename expansion. BTW glob doesn't use regex but expands filenames like the unix shell.

It's a lot less typing anyway ;)

Also, you could use File::Slurp to read the files.

use File::Slurp;

my $text = read_file($filename);

# or

my @lines = read_file($filename);
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