Before you try this out, you may actually want to look at what a Word .doc file actually looks like in a plain old text viewer. There's a lot of junk in there you don't want to count.

I'd suggest saving your .doc file off as text first, if you really want to do this through perl.

Once you've got just the text you want to count, you can do what you want in several ways. Here are my contributions:

open FILE, "<$file";
my @lines = <FILE>;
print "Lines: " . scalar(@lines) . "\n";
print "Chars: " . length(join '', @lines) . "\n";
close FILE;
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~CubicSpline
"No one tosses a Dwarf!"