G'day epimenidecretese,

I'm not completely sure what you're after. A small, representative sample of data and expected output would have helped.

If by "pile up all the code" you mean process all of your HTML files in a single run, then yes, getting a frequency count of all the tags in all the files "is possibile in a few lines of code".

Here's pm_1082082_html_tag_count.pl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

my %tags;

while (<>) {
    ++$tags{$1} while /<(?!\/)([^ >]+)/g;
}

print "$_\t$tags{$_}" for sort { $tags{$b} <=> $tags{$a} } keys %tags;
[download]

Here's some dummy input data. You can view those in a browser if you want: they render OK but they're not very interesting.

$ ls -l pm_1082082_*.html
-rw-r--r--  1 ken  staff  237 13 Apr 12:13 pm_1082082_1.html
-rw-r--r--  1 ken  staff  237 13 Apr 12:12 pm_1082082_2.html
[download]

$ cat pm_1082082_1.html
<h1 id="H-1">Heading 1</h1>
<p class="sub-heading">
Some <strong>bold</strong> and <em>italic</em> text.</p>
<h2 id="H-1-2">Heading 1.2</h2>
<p>Para1 (1.2.1)</p><p>Para2 (1.2.2)</p>
<p><strong>Fake newlines:</strong><br /><br><br /></p>
[download]

$ cat pm_1082082_2.html
<h1 id="H-2">Heading 2</h1>
<p class="sub-heading">
Some <strong>bold</strong> and <em>italic</em> text.</p>
<h2 id="H-2-2">Heading 2.2</h2>
<p>Para1 (2.2.1)</p><p>Para2 (2.2.2)</p>
<p><strong>Fake newlines:</strong><br /><br><br /></p>
[download]

Here's a sample run:

$ pm_1082082_html_tag_count.pl pm_1082082_*.html
p       8
br      6
strong  4
h1      2
em      2
h2      2
[download]

If that's not what you're after, you'll need to clarify what you do want and, as already mentioned, sample input and expected output will help.

[If you're unsure of what information to provide, the guidelines in "How do I post a question effectively?" should help.]