What does <*> mean in Perl?

Question

In the code below, what exactly does the <*> command do?

my @usbHddFileList = <*>;
foreach $usbHddFile (@usbHddFileList)
{
    system("rm -f $curMountDir/$usbHddFile < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1");
}

Answer 1

It's a glob. According to perlop:

If what's within the angle brackets is neither a filehandle nor a simple scalar variable containing a filehandle name, typeglob, or typeglob reference, it is interpreted as a filename pattern to be globbed, and either a list of filenames or the next filename in the list is returned, depending on context. This distinction is determined on syntactic grounds alone.

Answer 2

• <> means readline(ARGV)
• <IDENTIFIER> means readline(IDENTIFIER)
• <$IDENTIFIER> means readline($IDENTIFIER)
• <...> (anything else) means glob(qq<...>)

So <*> means glob(qq<*>) or glob('*').

glob is used to generate a number of strings or file names from a pattern.

In list context, <*> aka glob('*') returns all the files in the current work directory other than those whose name starts with ..