Cheating? Possibly, except is

Fully utilizing implied and default behaviours....

One possibly definition of the word perlish?

If so, does this desirability stop at Perl's front (or back) door? :^p

On a slightly serious note, if you run japhy's mini masterpiece on itself on a *nix box, what does it report its own length to be? 14|15|16??

I assume this will depend on whether the editor used to create the file automatically terminates the last (only) line, and how it is terminated?