Need to assign result of grep to var in PERL
 

I'm in PERL.

I've got a variable, say $x

I want to run a system call, say "grep -c mystring myfile", and assign the result of the grep back to $x.

When I say result of the grep, that would be what one would normally see in stdio... NOT the 0 (success) or errcode of the actual call to grep.

I've tried

$x = system("grep -c mystring myfile");

but that just gives me 0 (indicating no error with the call to grep) rather than my expected count (which in my case is 14).

How do I get the $x to contain the value 14, or whatever the grep would spit out to stdio?

Thanks!

$x = `grep -c mystring myfile`;