You have the right idea but your syntax is off. The []s create a refrenence to an array (when they don't extract elements from one), so putting those around the split causes problems.

If you care about the directive part, then I'd think it would be better to split once and use: 

my ($command, $first, $second) = (split)[0,1,-1];

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In reply to Re: split'ing lines with variable number of fields by wog
in thread split'ing lines with variable number of fields by IraTarball

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