my @items = split /:/ $line;

Assuming the quoted statement is made syntactically correct as haukex suggests, if you print or dump (see the Data::Dumper core module) the  @items array with
    print @items;
or
    use Data::Dumper;
    print Dumper \@items;
do you see what you expect?

If the  @items array contains what you expect, how would you access a specific element of the array (which would correspond to selecting a field of the original record)? How would you select multiple fields? Might it be more convenient to use an array slice?