Just to be clear, your unix-like command counts the number of files and folders in the current working directory with names starting with "246.56". This is what you wanted, right?

If you want to look in other folders or just want a little more control over what's going on, it may be useful to look into the builtin opendir and readdir functions or even move up to the File::Find or Find::File::Rule modules.

For counting lines, there's clearly more than one way to do it, but a simple while(<F>){$words += split;} over each file gets it done (with a well placed my $words to count per file or cumulatively). I may get trashed for this last bit of sloppy code but it's a beginning.

Update: I should learn to type faster. Didn't see that two similar answers showed up while chicken-scratching my own.