Hello jlope043

if you are refreshing your Perl skill, please note the modern form of opening files using lexical filehandle instead of bareword ones:

open my $fh, '<', $filepath or die "could not open:$!";

Also if you use the low precedence or parens are unneeded.

If I understand your need your $find begins at 18 not 32:

# warning windows doublequote

perl -lanE "print $1 if /^.{17}(.*)/" datacolumn.txt

HT000000000 123 50 70 80
H0000000000 123 50 70 80
HT000000000 123 50 70 80
[download]

Or if you want to use @F faciliy provided by -a Perl switch you can print element using negative indexes (because you have JOHN, DOE JR ie variable lenght fields)

perl -lanE "say join ' ',@F[-5,-4,-3,-2,-1]" datacolumn.txt

HT000000000 123 50 70 80
H0000000000 123 50 70 80
HT000000000 123 50 70 80
[download]

Finally if you want to refresh your Perl Modern Perl is very worth a read and is free!

HtH

L*