You could subsitute out the last Single chatacter with or without a period "."

You also had an anonymous array ref in your @names array. Fixed in the below code.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @names = ( "Mark K.", "Bob H", "Kurt", "Mary Kay K",
"Mary Jo Z.",  "Mary Jo" );

foreach my $name ( @names ) {

  $name =~ s/ [a-zA-Z].?$//;
  print "$name \n";

}
[download]

Prints:

Mark
Bob
Kurt
Mary Kay
Mary Jo
Mary
[download]