I acknowledge this was not the point of your node.

but

although you can make an array slice out of unpack's results, you can also use a LHS undef for padding in these situations :

my $line="partnum   partdesc  color     flavor    ";
my ($part, $desc, undef, $flava)= unpack "A10A10A10A10", $line;
print "--\n$part\n$desc\n$flava\n--";
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which I find easy to parse.