here's some well-behaved code that should do what you want. notice use strict;, -w, and error checking. notice the use of a hash (anytime you think unique, think hash.) also note, close filehandles when you're done with them.

by the way, i've tested this, and it works for me.

oh, and you should use the reply link to the right of the post, to make sure the author you're replying to sees the response.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$|++;

use FileHandle;

my $FILE = new FileHandle;

# three-argument open, with error handling
open($FILE,"<","/var/log/everything") 
    or die "ERROR: can't open file! $!";

# create variables:
#   $pattern - pattern for regular expression
#   %parsed  - hash, keys are lines containing pattern, 
#              values are counter of times seen
#   $i       - counter of total lines matching pattern
my $pattern = 'fwa';
my (%parsed, $i);

while(<$FILE>){
{   # read line from filehandle, assign to special variable $_
    if( /$pattern/i && $i++ )
    # search $_ for 'fwa' (case-insensitive) 
    # and increment counter ($i) if found
    {
        chomp $_;        # remove newline
        $parsed{ $_ }++; # use line as hash key, increment times seen
    }
}
close($FILE);

# print output: total entities, and sorted number of each
print "\n $i  entities\n";
print "$_ x $parsed{$_}\n" for sort keys %parsed;
[download]

~Particle

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