This Perl script calculates the total number of nucleotides in a FASTA file. It reads the input file line by line, skipping lines that begin with the ">" character (sequence headers), and sums the length of every remaining line after removing newline characters. The script uses core Perl functionality, including the `-s` flag for optional switch parsing, the `shift` and `@ARGV` array for command-line arguments, and a standard file handle opened with `open`. It prints the final nucleotide count to standard output. The example demonstrates a simple command-line bioinformatics utility for sequence statistics.