It is inefficient to read a file this large into memory. Instead you should process the file line-by-line:

    my @words;
    my $len;

    while (<TEXT>) {
        $len += @words = split /\s+|[,:]/;
    }

    print "LEN = $len\n";
[download]

The regex here is a guess at what you might need.

--
John.