Cazbo,
If you are familiar with the unix command wc, it sounds like you are trying to re-implement that. If you are not doing this as a "learning" exercise, I would recommend you use an existing wheel (see PPT for instance). If you are just trying to do this yourself, here is something that should get you started:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = $ARGV[0] or die "Usage: $0 <input_file>";
open(my $fh, '<', $file) or die "Unable to open '$file' for reading: $
+!";
my ($line_cnt, $word_cnt, $char_cnt);
while (<$fh>) {
    chomp;
    $line_cnt++;
    $char_cnt += length($_);
    my @word = split " ", $_;
    $word_cnt += @word;
}
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