To do it literally as awk does it, use: 
@tokens = split " ", $line;

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That enables "awk emulation mode", causing leading whitespace to be ignored. Without that, leading whitespace generates an empty first element, and the first non-whitespace stuff being the second element.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: Help for awk/regex/newbie by merlyn
in thread Help for awk/regex/newbie by cmenser

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