Well okay, but I think the OP wanted to partition messages by type, not count instances. So to perlify further: 

my %messages = map { $_ => [] } qw(error alert warning);
my $logfile = '/var/log/messages';

open my $log, "<", $logfile or die "$logfile: open: $!";
while (<$log>) {
    for my $type (keys %messages) {
        push @{ $messages{$type} }, $_ if /$type/;
    }
}
close $log or die "$logfile: close: $!"; # as long as we're bothering 
+with explicit close, we may as well test it for success.

[download]

I know you know it, but there's no reason to \Q the type names here since they don't contain dangerous characters.

In reply to Re^3: Not exactly Dereferencing... but in that ball park by gaal
in thread Not exactly Dereferencing... but in that ball park by jcpunk

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