I read that page a while ago, threw me off because the $count = (my pattern matching) format didn't seem to work. But apparently, $count = () = pattern match does, cool! I learn something new every day:

use strict;
use warnings;

open (HANDLE, 'C:\username\Sources') || die;
$_ = join '', <HANDLE>;
my $c = () = m/\\/g;
print "Found $c matches!";
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