foreach my $word (sort keys %count) {
      printf "%-31s %s\n", $word, $count{$word};
}
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The only thing is, is that this program shows the frequency of every word in the appeared order of the text file. What would I need to add, to be able to not only get the before mentioned result but also listing the ten most commonly used words in descending order?

• Sort your hash by value, not by key. Use a coderef or a compare function for sort. See sort. sort { $count{$b} <=> $count{$a} } keys %count should do the trick.
• Stop after writing 10 records. See last. Hint: Add a counter to the loop.

Alexander