Just for the fun of it I had to try doing this with my favorite function, map. These two lines seem to do the trick:

my $i = -1;
%record = map {defined($fields[++$i]) ? ($fields[$i] => $_) : ()} (spl
+it /\t/, $_);
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but I would not recommend using such an abomination in production code!

Now if only I could think of a good way to get rid of that temporary variable, which feels so profoundly un-Perlish...