I'll bet dragonchild thought of this and omitted it for some reason. Not being as wise I'll go ahead and put it out there. This is the same solution without the temporary @files array.
opendir(DIR, $directory) or die $!;
my %fileHash = map { (/^(\w{3}\d*):log\.$date$/ => $_); }
grep /^\w{3}\d*:log\.$date$/, readdir(DIR);
closedir DIR;
I also took the liberty of adding a '\' before the '.' in your regex. It looked like you meant a literal '.' not 'any character'. I think dragonchild's is more easily understood but I like this one.
UPDATE: Even though this works and is all true, look a little lower to japhy's. It's better.
Ira,
"So... What do all these little arrows mean?"
~unknown