Warning: There is no Perl in this post!

For what you are doing, you could get most of that via the commandline tools:

> ls * | xargs wc -l
[download]

Or, if you have a directory tree that you want to examine:

> find . -type f | xargs wc -l
[download]

This will even give you your total, but you may hit the limit of the size of a command line.