There's not a lot to go on here, but my gut feeling is that $ch_count must be getting larger than the string you're looking at.

It looks to me like you're trying to grab the first two words out of each line... maybe a different approach would work better?

my $line = 'This    is     a    test';
my (@words) = split( /\s+/, $line);
my $twowords = $words[0] . ' ' . $words[1];
print "$twowords\n";
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Trek