readdir() will always read in a complete directory, there is no way around that - and for what I know, there is no function in Perl to hint to the operating system that you are only interested in a certain subset of the files either, as Perl comes from a UNIX background and Unix does not have the notion of wildcards in the file system. Wildcard expansion is always done by the shell under UNIX.

To accomplish what you want done, you do (untested!) the following :

  opendir DIR, $directory or die "Couldn't open $directory : $!\n";
  @files = readdir( DIR ) or die "Couldn't read from $directory : $!\n
+";
  closedir( DIR );

  @files = grep @files, { /\.txt$/ && -f $_ };
[download]

(I hope that this test thing in grep() works the way I want it. The RE part checks if the name ends with ".txt", and the -f part checks if the name corresponds to a file (and not a directory)). Another solution for you could be to let the user specify all files (in UNIX-style) on the command line, there even is a module called GlobArgv, which does wildcard expansion for you automagically (under Win32).

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