Just a parenthetic note. If  $junk is something you don't care about at all, then you don't need to bother capturing it:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $total = qq{123\tasdfghhj\n};
 print qq{[$total]]};
 ;;
 ($total) = split /\t/, $total, 2;
 print qq{'$total'};
"
[123    asdfghhj
]]
'123'
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