Regarding your example, I think that one part of the problem (which you mentioned in the first paragraph of your comment) is that you are still a novice. I can

Regarding your example, I think that one part of the problem (which you mentioned in the first paragraph of your comment) is that you are still a novice. I cannot claim to be an expert in FP or Haskell, but here's how I would go about your problem. First, I think your problem really has two tasks to perform: getting a list of files that don't exist, and selecting only a part of those inexistant files. It would make sense to decompose these two tasks into two different functions, and since Haskell has non-strict evaluation, we don't have to worry about generating too much data (list of inexistant files) for nothing. Starting with the function to select inexistant files: inexistantFiles :: [FilePath] -> IO [FilePath] inexistantFiles files = filterM (\f -> doesFileExist f >>= return . not) files Some Haskellers may prefer to write their functions completely point-free, but I like to have my variables in the code if it helps me read the coder better. And then we can write another small function to select only the `n` first inexistant files: takeInexistantFiles :: Int -> [FilePath] -> IO [FilePath] takeInexistantFiles n files = takeM n (inexistantFiles files) where takeM n = liftM (take n) (Surely, we'd prefer to just write `takeM` and call it directly on the result of `inexistantFiles`, but I prefered to go with the specialized function.) Someone who knows Haskell better than I do could certainly come up with a cleaner solution, but I think the code is readable, solves the problem you mentioned and isn't any harder to understand than the equivalent imperative code. Have a Merry Christmas!