How odd. Using a file (master.txt as you suggest) and the offered input data (tab separated)

1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9
[download]

I have no problems: I get a list as expected. However, after adding a single and double quote

1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9 ' "
[download]

things behave as you describe: an empty list results. As such I concluded that Enlil got it right, and there's a bug/behavior problem associated with unmatched quotes in the Text::ParseWords module.

I'm testing this with 5.8.0 (Cygwin) and 5.6.1 (Activestate).