As you have a stream you probably want to use stream parsing logic. Here is an example:

my ( $space, $wc );
my $get_words = 5;

while( read(DATA,$_,1) ) {
    if ( m/\s/ ) {
        $space = 1;
    }
    else {
        if ( $space ) {
            print "\n";
            $space = 0;
            $wc++;
            last if $wc >= $get_words;
        }
        print;
    }
}
__DATA__
There  was   an 

old

lady who lived

in    a    shoe
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