Programming Perl, 4th Edition

readdir

readdir DIRHANDLE

This function reads directory entries (which are simple filenames) from a directory handle opened by opendir. In scalar context, this function returns the next directory entry, if any; otherwise, it returns undef. In list context, it returns all the rest of the entries in the directory, which will be a null list if there are no entries. For example:

opendir(THISDIR, ".") || die "serious dainbramage: $!";
@allfiles = readdir THISDIR;
closedir THISDIR;
say "@allfiles";

That prints all files in the current directory on one line. If you want to avoid the “.” and “..” entries, incant one of these (whichever you think is least unreadable):

@allfiles = grep { $_ ne "." && $_ ne ".." } readdir THISDIR;
@allfiles = grep { ! /^[.][.]?\z/ } readdir THISDIR;
@allfiles = grep { ! /^\.{1,2}\z/ } readdir THISDIR;
@allfiles = grep !/^\.\.?\z/, readdir THISDIR;

And to avoid all .* files (like the ls program):

@allfiles = grep !/^\./, readdir THISDIR;

To get just text files, say this:

@textfiles = grep –T, readdir THISDIR;

But watch out on that last one because the result of readdir ...