#!/perl/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my($ifh, @all_lines);
open($ifh, "text.txt") or die "Could not read file.\n";

while (<$ifh>) {

  # split's default delimiter is whitespace, and if
  # no expression is supplied, it splits $_ 

  my @lineinfo = split;   


  for (@lineinfo) {

    # print each element on it's own line
    print $_, "\n";
  } 

  print "\n";

  print sprintf qq(Line %d has %d elements.\n\n), $., $#lineinfo + 1;

  # push a reference to each array into an array
  push (@all_lines, \@lineinfo);    
}

close $ifh;

# Dump it all out...
print Dumper(\@all_lines);

__DATA__
one two three
four five six
seven eight
nine ten eleven twelve