Make it a global variable, don't use "my"

Ummm... Just a thought, aside from what diotalevi said, I don't think Perl would be happy with that solution since the original poster has Use Strict; in his code.
It's poor coding practice to unnecessarily declare such broad scopes when smaller scopes would be just as effective. I can't tell you how often I reuse variable names, making it even more important to limit their scope. Can you imagine the kind of bugs that would crop up if you use a global variable called $count in all your While loops?

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Is it fair to stick a link to my site here?

Thanks for you patience.