There are 2 errors in your code: a syntax error '$pattern = \b\w+\b;' and a logical one. Try this:

my ($count,$pattern,$file) =
  ( 0 , qr{\b\w+\b} , shift );
# declares and initializes the three variables
# see perlop for qr//

open FILE,$input or die "Error: $!";
# please read `perldoc -q 'quoting.*vars'`

while(<FILE>){
   $count += () = /$pattern/g;
   # that's kind of an idiom for counting the matches
   # it forces list context on m//g, but forces scalar
   # context on the resulting empty(?) list
   # that returns the number of elements that were
   # assigned to the list, although
   # in the end it's all thrown away, never reaching any
   # accessible memory outside the perl-internals...
   # -- it counts the number of matches
}
close FILE;
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HTH

UPDATE: yes, qr// instead of qx//, i mixed 'em up, because i don't often use qr//. Thanks to sauoq and wog

 $count += () ... kind of an idiom

I've always hated that idiom. It's so satanic.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $COUNT = 0;

while(<DATA>){
  $COUNT++ while m{\b\w+\b}g;
}

die  "COUNT $COUNT";


__END__
Hello there boss!  How are you doing today.
I really hope you don't slip on that banana peel.
I count 22 words.
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____________________________________________________
** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

I think fruiture meant to write qr instead of qx. ("Quote Regex" as opposed to "Quote eXecute". Of course checking perlop, as reccommended, would hopefully let one fiquire this out...)

well - since you use #!/usr/bin/perl you probably have wc at your fingertips. wc -w <file> could do what you want. You could just backtick it in your perl script. But then again this wouldn't be portable.

Then, there is CPAN. String::ParseWords could be interesting. Or look there! wc in a portable manner!

For a simple task all this may seem good enough. But when it comes to real word counting you first need to tokenize your text. Tokenizing is an art for itself. Have a look at This Book if you're really into it. And don't forget to make it unicode safe. :-)

Bye
 PetaMem

The link to the book you recommend is down

In firefox 1.5

"Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www-nlp.stanford.edu"

I believe, however, that this is the book you mean Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Programing

2006-04-13 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Link?'