From this week's Perl course:

opendir(DH, ".");
while ($igot = readdir(DH)) {
  next if ($igot =~ /^\.{1,2}$/);
  print "igot $igot\n";
}

You'll notice that I have used a regular expression to check for files called dot and dot-dot, which are the current and parent directory, as I typically would NOT want to process each of them in my loop.

Other alternatives ... this is Perl so "There is more than one way" ... include:

@files = glob("*");

@files = <*>

@files = `ls`

but although each of these is shorter, they are not recommended for heavy directory traversal applications - in each case, they return you a sorted list of names and that sorting can be useful for a single directory, but wasteful in a heavier application that's going through a large number of directories.

Once you are traversing a directory, you can do all sorts of things - use operators such as -d to find out what is a subdirectory, and -s to find the size of individual contents, for example.

If you want to find the biggest file in or below a directory (perhaps you're running out of disc space?), we have a sample program here from our Perl for larger projects course.
(written 2008-10-11 07:25:48)

 P215 - Perl - More about Files
P602 - Perl - Advanced File and Directory Handling

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23:30 bookings and midnight checkins
Seend, near Melksham, Wiltshire
Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls
Processing all files in a directory - Perl
Text formating for HTML, with PHP
Caen Hill and Olivers Castle
Dont bother to write a Perl program
Perl - map to process every member of a list (array)
What a shock