If that's the case:

use strict;    # Don't comment it out.
open RERUN, "rerunlrg" or die "Couldn't open input file.\n$!";
while ( my $line = <RERUN> ) {
    print "Matched:\n$1\n\n" if $line =~ m/^(\S+\s+\S+)/;
}
close RERUN;
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Go ahead and give that a try.

One problem your regexp has is that you're not putting a quantifier after your \w metachars. That means that you're trying to match a single word character, followed by any positive amount of whitespace, followed by a single word character, followed by a single whitespace, followed by any amount of anything. You really want to be matching words of arbitrary length, presumably longer than a single character each.

Another problem your script has is that you're not checking for success when you open the file. You should probably be invoking die if there is a failure to open the file. See the example I provided. You can read up on this issue in perlopentut.

What you probably want is something along the lines of

^(\w+\s+\w+\b)
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use strict;
use warnings;

open RERUN, "rerunlrg" or die "Can't open rerunlrg: $!";
while (<RERUN>) {
  next if $. % 2 == 0; # Skip the second, fourth, ... line

  if (m[(\S+)\s+(\S+)]) {
    print "Matched: $1 $2\n";
  }
}
close RERUN;
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Hey TilRman ..dat was neat!!! thanks

while (<DATA>) {

    # We could use split( /\s+/, $_, 3 ) to explicitly
    # set the max split limit to 3, but split() is smart
    # enough to see we are capturing into 2 variables and
    # automatically sets the limit to 3. Smart perl!

    my ($first, $second) = split( /\s+/ );
    print "Line $.: '$first $second'\n";
}

__DATA__
this is the first line right here
line two comes next way down here
then third line is here
fourth comes next
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