Firing up the regex engine to make a simple numeric comparison is like using a blunderbus to swat flies.

This is probably an order of magnitude more efficient:

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my @counts;

++$counts[ 1+ ( $_ <=> 0 ) ] while <DATA>;

printf "Neg:%d Zero:%d Pos:%d\n", @counts;


__DATA__
29
-62
696
242
78
-564
0
45
855
22
-67
[download]

Output:

C:\test>1183178.pl
Neg:3 Zero:1 Pos:7
[download]