Thanks Ken, for bringing up getpwent. BTW, i used the other approach which did not mention getpwent, but still the job was done, by the code below : 
my $HAN = "handle";
my $FILE = "passwd.txt";
open("$HAN", "$FILE")||die "Error opening file: $!\n";

while(<$HAN>) {
my ($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$dir,$shell) = split(/:/,$_);
print "UID is: $uid\n";
print "GID is: $gid\n";

}

close("$HAN");

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In reply to Re^2: traverse through passwd file, and split fields to extract UID/GID by intoperl
in thread traverse through passwd file, and split fields to extract UID/GID by intoperl

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