Question

I usually use something like

my $dir="/path/to/dir";
opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "can't open $dir: $!";
my @files = readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

or sometimes I use glob, but anyway, I always need to add a line or two to filter out . and .. which is quite annoying.
How do you usually go about this common task?

Answer 1

I will normally use the glob method:

for my $file (glob "$dir/*") {
    #do stuff with $file
}

This works fine unless the directory has lots of files in it. In those cases you have to switch back to readdir in a while loop (putting readdir in list context is just as bad as the glob):

open my $dh, $dir
    or die "could not open $dir: $!";

while (my $file = readdir $dh) {
    next if $file =~ /^[.]/;
    #do stuff with $file
}

Often though, if I am reading a bunch of files in a directory, I want to read them in a recursive manner. In those cases I use File::Find:

use File::Find;

find sub {
    return if /^[.]/;
    #do stuff with $_ or $File::Find::name
}, $dir;