Can you give us a reference (page, edition) for the code you showed (without using <c>...code here... </c> code tags; for shame. Read instructions at the SOPW text-entry box.) And check the O'Reilly site for reports of typos and corrections to whichever edition you're using.

I suspect there's either a typo or a prior discussion of capturing from STDIN, "Standard In," AKA "the console." If you follow your code at the command line with numbers, hoping that will feed them to split and @numbers the disappointment you specify will occur. But you'll get the expected results if you collect the user's numbers like this:

C:\>perl -E "print 'your input please: ' ; my $input = <>; say $input;
+"
your input please: 1 2 32
1 2 32
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And, with the syntax you showed:

C:\>perl -E "print 'Enter nums: '; use Data::Dumper;@numbers; push @nu
+mbers, split while <>; say Dumper @numbers;"
Enter nums: 3 5 7 912 11
^Z
$VAR1 = '3';
$VAR2 = '5';
$VAR3 = '7';
$VAR4 = '912';
$VAR5 = '11';
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