Ooops ! well.... err.. after a number of silly errors and loss of hard drive, I lost the working script generated from this thread.
This is my reconstruction but it doesn't insert anything where the SSI is placed. Can someone see any obvious errors with this;

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# =====================================================================
# ---------------------
# Record Counter V1.0
# ---------------------
#
# =====================================================================

my $curr = 1;
open (CURR, "default.db") or die $!;
$curr++ while (<CURR>);
close CURR;
print $curr;
exit;
}


Thank you :(