Don't use a regex if you don't really want a regex, which you don't, because you now found all the items that contain "a", not just be equal to them. You probably wanted this instead: 
print "a occurs ".grep($_ eq "a", @list)," times\n";

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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to RE: RE: Counting occurances by merlyn
in thread Counting occurances by fundflow

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