in reply to Can you write a faster code to perform this task?

Running this slightly modified version of your code:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];

my $start = time;
my $count=0;
while( <DATA> ) {
    while( /(M+)/g ) {
      $count++;
    }
}
print $count."\n";

printf "Took %9f secs\n", time() - $start;

__DATA__
iiiiiiiiMMMMMMMMMMMooooooooooooMMMMMMMMMMiiiiiMMMMMMMMoooo
iiiiiiiiMMMMMMMMMMMooooooooooooMMMMMMMMMMiiiiiMMMMMMMMoooo
... 79998 more lines as above ...

[download]

Resulted in this output:

C:\test>junk
240000

Took  0.199589 secs

[download]

0.2 of a second to count the quarter million occurrences of your search term in 80,000 lines doesn't seem excessive to me. How much time are you looking to save?

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