Phoenix.pm: Code problem

[Beaves at aol.com]

OK, OK!!  I have to fess up that the $size assignment in Ron's code is 
totally and completely greek to me...

$size = `wc -w $out_file | tr -s " " | cut -f1 -d " "` ;

Can someone go through that assignment statement,  character by character and 
decipher it for me (and I'm sure others)?

Thanks.

Feeling stupider than the original code writer by suggesting it was a 
returned list...,

Tim