here's a different twist. at first i thought map was a good fit for this.... merlyn has helped me learn to love map.

opendir D,'.' or die "opendir: $!\n";
print((map{$i+=!-f}readdir(D))-$i);
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of course, for a newbie, this isn't appropriate as is, since without temp variables it's a little hard to understand.
i just thought i'd post it because i prefer opendir and readdir, and i love map.

=Particle