-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Well, with respect to maintainability, I would think that File::Find would be much easier to maintain, once you understand how it works.

As for your code, the problem is the line

my @files = readdir(DIR) || die "Unable to read $workdir: $!\n";
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The || operator has a higher precedence than the assignment, which means the readdir() gets evaluated in a scalar context; i.e., it returns only one directory entry. Try the or operator, for the effect you're looking for:

my @files = readdir(DIR) or die "Unable to read $workdir: $!\n";
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(Now, if you had been using File::Find, you wouldn't have had to figure this out ;-) ...)

Someone with little or no experience with Perl is going to find it impossible to maintain your code as you have it above. Even we are having a hard time with it.

use File::Find;
use strict;

my $start_from = 'c:\mydocu~1';

if (shift(@ARGV) =~ /all/) {
   find(\&search_all, $start_from);
} else {
   find(\&search_none, $start_from);
}

sub search_all {
   unlink if /\.\d+\w+\-\d+\wm$|\.log$/i;
}

sub search_none {
   unlink if /\.\d+\w+\-\d+\wm$/i;
}
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Note that I'm not having it print "No files to delete". If you want that feature you'll have to set a flag or something when you delete something, and check for that flag when your script exits. As you're doing it in your code, you'll get a "No files to delete" message for every file that does not match your regexp criteria, which is probably not what you want.

That is a much easier way of doing it. One question, how do you set the flags you are talking about?
I also took a look at the else statements I wrote and you are correct. Why do I want to print out the statement once for everyfile that does not match? So I corrected protion of the code. Once again you are the man, thanks.
curtisb