You can do two things: either the approach you already mentioned, using five arrays, and maybe that's what you really want. Alternatively however, an array of arrays would probably a be better solution.

Using five arrays:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my (@x,@y1,@y2,@y3,@y4);

while(<>) { # reads a line into $_
    chomp; # remove the newline from its end
    my @val = split; # with no parameters, split() splits $_ on whites
+pace
    push @x, # push() to append to the end of @x
        shift @val; # shift pulls the first element out of an array
    push @y1, shift @val;
    push @y2, shift @val;
    push @y3, shift @val;
    push @y4, shift @val;
}
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But, probably much better, using an array of arrays:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @val;

while(<>) {
    chomp;
    push @val, [ split ];
}
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or even chomp, push @val, [ split ] while <>; as the last part. Then you can later access the elements with something like print $val[3]->[0]; to see the x value of the 4th line. To see how it all works, have a look into the perllol (lol = list of lists) and the perlreftut documentation.

Makeshifts last the longest.