Is there a better way to count occurrence of char in a string?

Question

I felt there must a better way to count occurrence instead of writing a sub in perl, shell in Linux.

#/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
return 1 unless $0 eq __FILE__;
main() if $0 eq __FILE__;
sub main{
    my $str = "ru8xysyyyyyyysss6s5s";
    my $char = "y";
    my $count = count_occurrence($str, $char);
    print "count<$count> of <$char> in <$str>\n";
}
sub count_occurrence{
    my ($str, $char) = @_;
    my $len = length($str);
    $str =~ s/$char//g;
    my $len_new = length($str);
    my $count = $len - $len_new;
    return $count;
}

Answer 1

Counting the occurences of a character in a string can be performed with one line in Perl (as compared to your 4 lines). There is no need for a sub (although there is nothing wrong with encapsulating functionality in a sub). From perlfaq4 "How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string?"

use warnings;
use strict;

my $str = "ru8xysyyyyyyysss6s5s";
my $char = "y";
my $count = () = $str =~ /\Q$char/g;
print "count<$count> of <$char> in <$str>\n";