opening file using wild card

[Looking2Learn]

Hey,
I'm trying to open a txt file, but I won't know the first three characters of the filename. For example, I want to open a "user.txt" file, and I know it will have three digits in front of it, like "123_user.txt", but they could be any three digits. Is there a way to introduce a wild card into the open command to specify this?

#!usr/bin/perl
 
open (FILE, "***_user.txt") or die "Can't find file!" ;
    print "Found file!" ;
close (FILE) ;
 

[nithinpes]

Wildcard cannot be used with open function. Are you trying to open any file/all files in the current directory that matches your criteria?
I am assuming that you want to search for files that match the criteria and open them. In this case, you can parse through the directory and fetch all files that match the criteria and open them for reading as below:

#!usr/bin/perl
use strict;
 
my @files;
opendir(DIR,".") or die "opening directory failed:$!";  # '.' for pwd.Use dir path if required. 
while(my $filename=readdir(DIR)){
 push @files,$filename if($filename=~/^\d\d\d_user\.txt$/);
}
closedir(DIR);
foreach my $file (@files) {
print "found $file\n";
open (FILE, "$file") or die "Can't find $file!" ;
while(<FILE>) {
### read
}
close (FILE) ;
}
 

[nithinpes]

In case you want to open any single file that match the criteria assign $filename to $file when a match is found and quit the while(my $filename=readdir(DIR)) {} loop.

[Looking2Learn]

Great, thanks!

And yes, there will only be one matching file. So, I'll use:

while(my $filename=readdir(DIR)){
my file = $filename if($filename=~/^\d\d\d_user\.txt$/);
}