Here's how I'd make sure there are no blank records in the file, to get an accurate count of the records that have data in them: (I've been doing a lot with regular expressions and file parsing lately) local $/; # Perl's record separator - default is \n unless... $/ = undef; # ... we make it undefined! open(SESAME,$file) # open the file $f = (<SESAME>); # the entire file, including all \n chars, is now sitting in a single scalar! close(SESAME); $f = s/\n+/\n/gs; # regular expression replaces contiguous strings of \n chars with single \n chars. $f = s/^\n//s; # removes \n at the start of the string, if there is one. $f = s/\n$//s; # removes \n at the end of the string, if there is one. @x = split(/\n/, $f); # split string on the \n char, store split values in array @x $x = @x; # the number of elements in @x print "There are $x records in file $file\n"; exit(0);