Due: September 21, 1999

(1)    Write a simple perl program to count the number of characters, words and lines in a user-specified file name, without opening the file directly within your Perl program.  That is, you cannot use the open statement.  A session of running the program looks like below.  User input is in green.  Hint: use the Unix system command wc and develop it in Apollo.

[yue@apollo whatever]$ ./wordcount.pl
file to count words => h3q1dat.txt
For file h3q1dat.txt:
   number of characters => 111.
   number of words => 19.
   number of lines => 5.
[yue@apollo whatever]$

The contents of h3q1dat.txt is:

This is a sentence.  This is another sentence.
Another line.
Yet another line.
The last sentence in two
lines.

(2)    Write a Perl function itemCount to count the number of scalar items (including ()) of an argument.  For example, for the following Perl code:

my $var1 = ['This', 'is', 'an', 'example', 'of',
            ['an', 'array', 'of', {hash => 'yes', array => 'no'}, 0, 1],
            {why => 'me', so => ()}, [{}]];
print "total count of var1 => ", itemCount($var1) , "\n";

my $var2 = 'hi';
print "total count of var2 => ", itemCount($var2) , "\n";

my $var3 = ();
print "total count of var3 => ", itemCount($var3) , "\n";

the following is the suitable output:

total count of var1 => 14
total count of var2 => 1
total count of var3 => 1