You've got an answer to your problem as stated, but there's another problem lurking in that code fragment: you're trashing the variable that holds the original lines. I highly recommend that you put the results of split into a different variable.

  foreach my $line ( @file ) {
      my @fields = split(/\s+/, $line);
      print "$fields[2]\n";
  }
[download]

avoids future problems.