Thanks for all the help guys, I really appreciate it. I have gotten the script to work almost entirely except for one problem; it seems to be interpreting the . at the beginning of each extension as any character. This results in an extension like .h finding all files that end with h. I believe the solution is to use glob pattern matching but I am unsure how to incorporate that into my find statements. Here is my updated (and better indented) code: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use File::Find;

sub  countThem  {
    $dir = '.';
    $filecount=0;
    $ext1=$_[2];
    find(sub{$filecount++ if $File::Find::name =~ /$ext1$/}, $dir);
    $filebytes=0;
    if ($filecount > 0 ){
        #`find . -name "*$_[2]" -print`;
        my @f;
        find ( sub {
            return unless /$ext1$/;
            push @f, $File::Find::name;
               },$dir);
        chomp(@f);
        foreach $a (@f){
            $fbytes=`cat $a | wc -c`;
            $filebytes=$filebytes+$fbytes;
        }}
    $_[0]=$filecount;
    $_[1]=$filebytes;
}

foreach $ext (@ARGV){
    $tmpfilecount=0;
    $tmpfilebytes=0;

    countThem ($tmpfilecount, $tmpfilebytes, $ext);
    if ( $tmpfilecount > 0 ){
        print STDOUT ("EXTENSION $ext, FILE COUNT: $tmpfilecount, FILE
+ CHARS: $\
tmpfilebytes\n");

}
}

[download]

any ideas?

In reply to Help needed with Perl script designed to find files by extension and count the number of chars by Griegomas

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