Multiple regex against files with speed

[crabbdean]

Hi Fellow Monks and Nuns,

I'm rewriting a perl module to do file listing because quite frankly I don't like File::Find. I've got it listing beautifully, its fast and in OO. I want to now add features. One is to be able to specify types of files or directories to match against.

In essence you have to be able to specify many types of files (eg. ~*.doc, ~*.tmp etc). It then has to check each file against ALL these types. Simply I want to know, what is the fastest way of doing this?

So far I'm considered:
1. Storing the regex string into the values of hashes and then doing a regex against each of the search hash values.

$found = 0;
$hash{1} = '*.doc';
$hash{2} = '*.xls';
$hash{3} = '*.ppt';
map {
     $found = 1 if $file =~ /$_/;
} values(%hash);

2. OR stringing all the searchstrings together into one big regex

$found = 0;
$hash{1} = '*.doc';
$hash{2} = '*.xls';
$hash{3} = '*.ppt';
for (values(%hash)) {
     $string .= $_ . "|";
}
$found = 1 if $file =~ /$string/;

Any other ideas? Speed is the key here. Thanks.

Oh, and if you have any other requests for what you'd like in this module or frequent types of things you do against files in your scripts, I'll see what I can do to add them in.