I tried not to make it too golfish, but dispensed with niceties such as error detection and somesuch (which aren't there in the bash version - still autodie wil

I tried not to make it too golfish, but dispensed with niceties such as error detection and somesuch (which aren't there in the bash version - still autodie will catch most snafus). I also joined a few lines to make it closer to what's happening in the shell version. No doubt experienced golfers could make it tighter/shorter, but methinks that's not the point of the exercise. #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use English; use autodie; $OFS=$ORS="\n"; sub f { my $h ; opendir($h,$_[0]) ; print "--",(readdir($h)),"--"; closedir($h);} my $out; open($out,">/tmp/out.txt") ; select $out ; f("/tmp");close($out); open($out,"| wc -l ") ; select $out ; f("/tmp"); close($out); select STDOUT; Would I use perl/python to write this kind of stuff? 'course not. Why would I go through the opendir rigmarole, if all I really need is 'ls'. But there are zillions of (non application) tasks where bash's syntax gets very quickly unwieldy (think filenames with blanks, quoting quotes, composing pipes programmatically, having several filehandles open at once...) while perl shines. And you can still throw the occasional @ary=split("\n",`ls`); around if you feel so inclined.