What results were you getting, what errors were output?
The following code seems to work for me

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @array = qw/v w x y z/;

for(1 .. 5) {

# I was expecting the array to shift
# at every loop, and I could call on
# the first position every time.

print $array[0] , "\n";

my $slide = shift(@array);
push(@array, $slide);

}
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