This is a more 'perl baby-talk' version of monktim's code, in which he exploits several perl idioms which you may not be familiar with (yet!):

my %fruit_counts;
foreach my $fruit(@fruit_list) {
  $fruit_counts{$fruit} = $fruit_counts{$fruit} + 1; #lhand for '++'
}

foreach my $fruit(keys %fruit_counts) {
  print "$fruit => ", $fruit_counts{$fruit}, "\n";
}
[download]

This is one of the neatest things about Perl! monktim's code and mine look very different but are very similar in an elemental sense.