And if yu really want to do it in Perl that you can always use the Shell module that is standard with Perl:

use Shell;
                                                                      
+          
my $foo = wc('-l', '.bash_profile');
                                                                      
+          
print $foo;
[download]

/J\

thulben@bravo:~
7$ wc -l file
10 file
thulben@bravo:~
8$ cat file | wc -l
10
thulben@bravo:~
9$

Or to reduce unnecessary forking you can just redirect STDIN:

   wc -l <file
[download]

/J\

>   wc's behavior differs ?


$cat file | wc -l
      10
$wc -l file
      10 file
$wc -l < file
      10
$
[download]

The output might be formatted differently but the counting remains the same.

pelagic