Note reading the filenames from an array is essentially the same as processing adir() list or the file exchange "pick of the week" linked to there is a higher-level alternative if the idea is to do the same thing to all files.
textscan is going to be a robust and fast method to read this file:
fid = fopen('temp.txt','rt');
C = textscan(fid,'%s%[^\n]');
fclose(fid);
C{1} contains a cell array of the first column in the text file,C{2} contains all words after that. You could also use this to solve your earlier question in a much neater way:
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