UPDATE 2 - I have posted the final script (final as in it's what I just turned it in - bear in mind this is an introductory class :) at the bottom of this post. Thanks again!

UPDATE - Wow! I came home and found all this great help! I appreciate all of it and will try to absorb it all. It should be said that this is for an intro Perl class, so things like proper use of strict; and deciding what a "word" is are kinda like swimming laps, whereas I'm currently just trying to float and not drown! I will say that in posting here at Perlmonks I have learned more in a shorter time than I ever have in any class...many thanks...and now back to my script. I'll update here with what I end up with.

Also known as "CTP learns a new stupid Perl trick"

So as some of you may remember, I'm working on a concordance script, and almost had it licked, until the end where I need to print out the top ten occuring words. I figured I should start a new thread since I've come to a whole new problem. Here's the script so far:

#! usr/bin/perl

use warnings;

open (TEXTFILE, 'text.txt') or die ("Cannot open file : $!");

$big_string = <TEXTFILE>;

$big_string = lc ($big_string);
$big_string =~ s/\(|\)/ /g;

@words = split (/[,.\s+]/, $big_string);

foreach (@words){
push @gt_three_char_words, $_ if /[a-zA-Z]{4,}|[a-zA-Z]{3,}'/;
}

foreach (@gt_three_char_words) {
$hash{$_}++;
}

foreach $key (sort {$hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a}} keys %hash) { 
for ($i=0; $i<=9; $i++) {
print "$key\t\t= $hash{$key}\n";
}}

[download]
The thing that I'm stuck on is the printing the top ten hits. The way it's written right now I get ten of the top word, ten of the next, ten of the next, etc, all the way thru the list. If I move the for loop outside I get the whole list ten times over.

How the heck do I just print the first ten? Again - thanks in advance!

btw - yes, we have already covered that I should be using strict; and declaring my variables, that I should really be slurping my text file (although the script currently does what it should thru some kludgy perl magic ;), and a few other things I need to fix before I turn it in. :-) 
#! usr/bin/perl
#midterm part 1

use warnings;
use strict;

my @gt_three_char_words = ();
my %hash = ();

open (TEXTFILE, 'text.txt') or die ("Cannot open file : $!");

my $big_string = <TEXTFILE>;

$big_string = lc ($big_string);
$big_string =~ tr/()//d;

my @words = split (/[,.:;!?\s]+/, $big_string);

foreach (@words)
{
    push @gt_three_char_words, $_ if /[a-zA-Z]{4,}|[a-zA-Z]{3,}'/;
}

foreach (@gt_three_char_words) 
{
    $hash{$_}++;
}

foreach my $key ( (sort {$hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a} } keys %hash ) [0..9]
+ ) 
{
    print "$key\t\t= $hash{$key}\n";
}

[download]

In reply to Tutelage, part two by ctp

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