If you were splitting on something other than whitespace (and thus couldn't use " " for the pattern), you could do:

@ar = split(/$pattern/, $str); 
shift(@ar);
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or

$str =~ s/^$pattern//;
@ar = split(/$pattern/, $str);
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If you knew the number of fields, you could also use:

@ar = (split(/$pattern/, $str))[1..$n-1];
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