Files | ls (s) | perl (s)
  1e4   0.187    0.109
  5e4   0.574    0.204
  1e5   1.217    0.300

graph: http://lacklustre.net/images/perl_vs_ls.png

##</code><code>##

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $path = shift || die;
my $count = 0;
opendir my $dir, $path or die;
while (readdir $dir) {
    ++$count;
}
close $dir;
print "$count\n";