You might want to construct your regular expression that captures all of the parameters separately. If you're weary about typing in an expression so large, you can construct it as a string and use that to match.

With the right tinkering, you can get all of your elements out in a single array. Using $DIGIT references limits how much you can get with each pass, since only 1 through 9 are available and you have many more elements than that.

I'd do something like this instead:

my $regex = '^-'
      .('(\S+)\s+'x18)
      .'(.{40})'
      .'(.{40})'
      .'(.*)';
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You should be able to use this as usual:

if (my @match = /$regex/o)
{
     # ... Use $match[0] through $match[20]
}
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Of course, if you're worried about speed, you'd spend some time with the Benchmark library testing variations.