I'm surprised that nobody yet mentioned not using Perl at all! What you want to do is possible with Gnu grep from the command line... 
grep --count thepattern whateverfile

[download]
Of course, this may not meet your requirements - notably, this returns a count of the lines matched per file rather than pattern matches per file. YMMV

In reply to Re: Opening file and checking for data by msemtd
in thread Opening file and checking for data by Anonymous Monk

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