UPDATE 01/03/04 - Just got home from Disneyland and added some code for whoever is still tuned into this thread.
So far I have:
#! usr/bin/perl
#midterm part 1

use warnings;

open (TEXTFILE, 'text.txt') or die ("Cannot open file : $!");

$big_string = <TEXTFILE>;

$big_string = lc ($big_string);
$big_string =~ s/\(|\)/ /g;

@words = split (/[,.\s+]/, $big_string);

foreach (@words){
push @gt_three_char_words, $_ if /[a-zA-Z]{4,}|[a-zA-Z]{3,}'/;
}

foreach (@gt_three_char_words) {
$hash{$_}++;
}

foreach (%hash) {
print $_, "\n";
}

[download]
As you can see I haven't implemented the slurp yet, but I did get nnn'n words to work, and I now have a hash with word keys and count values. I went for the foreach instead of the map for now. I'll play with map (and grep) later. It may be all downhill from here, so many thanks to everyone who helped...I learned a ton!
Quoted from the original post:
The problem at hand is to write a script which will read a text file, and list the most common words found, >4 characters, and print out the top ten, each with their number of occurences, sorted by frequency.

In reply to tutelage needed by ctp

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