Processing OS Files in an Oracle Directory

Question

I have an application that gets XML files and stores them in a directory. I'd like to write a PL/SQL program that I can schedule to process all files in the directory. I won't know at run time what the file names are, so I need a way to somehow loop through all files in the directory, do my processing, and exit when I've run out of files.
I've been reviewing documentation and it doesn't look like fileGetName or fileExists will work for this type of processing, since they either assume a known file name or return the directory name, which I'll need to specify since there are multiple directories used by this process.
In pseudo-code, here's what I have in mind:
declare
cursor all_files is
select filename from xml_in; --xml_in is my Oracle directory where the files will live.
eachFile all_files%ROWTYPE;
begin
open all_files;
loop
fetch all_files into eachFile;
exit when all_files%NOTFOUND;
--Do my XML processing here
end loop;
close all_files;
end;
Is it possible to do this kind of processing on external files? If so, how can I get something that would function like the cursor described above to work?

Answer 1

The files are unknown to Oracle, I'm using an Oracle directory just as a save point for processing. I've got an external application written that will process the xml (actually, it calls an already-completed PL/SQL stored procedure) but I'd like to have portability between the different OS's.
Short answer to your question...No.