How do I read all the file names of a directory into an array?

Ri-Del has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question: ⭐ (directories)

I would like to read the names of all the files in a directory of mine into an array so that I can convert each file name into a link to that file. Currently I am doing this in the following manner. I read the "dir.dat" file with the following command, "ls > dir.dat." I should like rather to get the current directory's files from within the script rather than having to do that command everytime I want to regenerate the html. How might I do this?

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
@filename;
$i = 0;
$total;
open(INFILE,"dir.dat");
while($filename[$i] = <INFILE>){
  chop($filename[$i]);
  $filename[$i] =~ s/\*//g;
  $i++;
  $total++;
}

$error = open(OUTFILE,"> dict.html");
if(!$error){
  print("ERROR\n");
  exit(0);
}

print(OUTFILE "<HTML>\n  <HEAD>\n  </HEAD>\n <BODY TEXT=#00ff00 LINK=#
+00ff00 VLINK=#00ff00 BGCOLOR=#000000 alink=00FF00>\n");

for($i=0;$i<=$total;$i++){
  print(OUTFILE "<A HREF=\"$filename[$i]\">$filename[$i]</A><BR>\n");
}

print(OUTFILE "</BODY>\n</HTML>\n");

close(OUTFILE);
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