sub ls {
  my $path = @_ ? shift : ".";
  local *DIR;
  opendir DIR, $path or die "can't ls $path: $!";
  return grep { $_ ne "." and $_ ne ".." } readdir DIR;
}
[download]

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a (from-home) job
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

what does the shift : "." do?

The ?: operator is like a condensed if/else block.

my $path;

# if an argument was passed, use it
if (@_) { $path = shift }

# otherwise, use "."
else { $path = "." }
[download]

That can be written as my $path = @_ ? shift : "."; -- and if I wanted to be even shiftier (pun intended), I could do my ($path) = (@_, "."); but that's probably rude.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a (from-home) job
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

opendir(DIR, "$path") || die "Error: $!";
@entry = grep { $_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..' } readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);
[download]

Your routine is named "listfiles", but it does more than just list files (it also lists directories, FIFO pipes, sockets, etc...) Also, it appears that you will skip any dot-files ( such as '.cshrc' ), not just '.' and '..'. Depending on what you are using this for, that might not be optimal.

sub listfiles {
  my $path = shift || '.';
  opendir ( DIR, $path ) or die "Can't open path: $!\n";
  return grep { -f "$path/$_" } readdir ( DIR );
}
[download]

(minor bug) this will fail on a directory named 0. either use japhy's solution above (which checks the length of @_,) or check $_[0] for definedness, not truth.

~Particle ;Þ

Ohh, yeah. Good point. It will be nice in perl 6 when we can say

 my $dir = shift // '.';
[download]

:-)

$map = 'c:\\some\\directory'

opendir (Directory, $map) or die "Cannot Open Directory";

@contents = readdir(Directory);

closedir(Directory);

splice(@contents, 0, 2);  # removes " . & .. "

foreach $content (@contents) {

    print "$content\n";

}

I have used this to capture the contents of a directory... Darrick...