I was working on something like this last night and found DBI::CSV to work quite nicely. You can pass the seperator char during connect() so that you aren't bound to commas.

my $hndl = DBI->connect( qq{"DBI:CSV:f_dir=/stuff:csv_sep_char=\\t} );
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DBI::CSV for more info.

I suspect '\t' is not quite right. \011 maybe?