Find the num of times a str appears in a file

Is this possible in Perl

[AWildman]

What I need to know is if there is a way to find out the number of times a phrase appears in a file. I'm creating a site search and need to know this for frequency. I know its easy enough to find out of a phrase appears in a file, but how do you find out how many times it appears?

Added:

Let me say, I'd like to do this without searching the file for the first occurrance of the word, then splitting the file after the first occurrance,and then searching the rest of the file, and so on for each occurance.

[VectorJ]

You could use something like:

while ($file =~ m/theword/g) {
 $x++;
}

Still using matching, but at least there's no splitting. Don't forget the /g at the end of the regex.

[AWildman]

I'll give that a whirl. Thank you very much!

[DrDoc]

$text = "foo bar baz foo widgets foo foo";
@count = ($text =~ /foo/g);
print ($#count + 1);

...will print 4

[DrDoc]

You can also do:

$text = "foo bar baz foo widgets foo foo";
$count = @{[$text =~ /foo/g]};
print $count;

[AWildman]

Awesome! I'll try that too. Thanks a bunch.