Question

Is there a function in Perl that lists all the files and directories in a directory?
I remember that Java has the File.list() to do this? Is there a comparable method in Perl?

Answer 1

If you want to get content of given directory, and only it (i.e. no subdirectories), the best way is to use opendir/readdir/closedir:

opendir my $dir, "/some/path" or die "Cannot open directory: $!";
my @files = readdir $dir;
closedir $dir;

You can also use:

my @files = glob( $dir . '/*' );

But in my opinion it is not as good – mostly because glob is quite complex thing (can filter results automatically) and using it to get all elements of directory seems as a too simple task.

On the other hand, if you need to get content from all of the directories and subdirectories, there is basically one standard solution:

use File::Find;

my @content;
find( \&wanted, '/some/path');
do_something_with( @content );

exit;

sub wanted {
  push @content, $File::Find::name;
  return;
}