I'm going to stick up for Red Hat here - I just installed 8.0, and during my config, I couldn't help but read PM. Probably dangerous as root, but hey. Here's a copy and paste, using grinder's example.

[root@localhost root]# cat split.pl
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $x1 = 'aaa bbb cc';
my $x2 = 'aa, bb, cc';

print join( '-', split(/[\s,]+/, $x1)), "\n";
print join( '-', split(/[\s,]+/, $x2)), "\n";
[root@localhost root]# ./split.pl
aaa-bbb-cc
aa-bb-cc
[root@localhost root]# perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
[download]

Seems to have worked just fine for me, so now I think it's a context thing, something about how you're using it. :) I'm using the Perl available via RPM, I haven't downloaded a snippet of source yet except for grinder's code. hehe.

~Brian