How could I use a regular expression to count the words in a file. Here is the code i'm trying to use. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my($count, $pattern);

my $input = shift;

$pattern = \b\w+\b;

open(FILE,"$input") or
    die "Error: $!\n";
    
$count = 0;

while(<FILE>)
{
    if(/$pattern/)
    {
        $count++;
    }
}


print "Word Count = ", $count, "\n\n";

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I get a backslash error on the line where I assign the pattern and it doesn't match any words. Would this find all the number of times there is a pattern with one or more characters in it surrounded by a boundry?

Thanks for the help -Brandon

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

In reply to Counting words in a file by raveguy2k

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