Problem

You want to count the words in a file, using Perl.

Solution

Obviously wc -w can be used for this under UNIX.

But fairly decent demo on the power of split and push! 🙂

Example


while(<>) { push @words, split; }

print "found ".scalar(@words)." words in filen";

Works nicely, even over multiple lines:


[[email protected]]/var/log/httpd% echo "test 1 23 4 n a b c" | perl -e 'while() {
chomp();
push @words, split;
}
print "found ".scalar(@words)." words in filen";
'
found 7 words in file


Reference

[tags]Perl Coding School[/tags]

• Perl Docs – push
• Perl Docs – split