I thought about using the natatime function from List::MoreUtils. It returns an iterator however, which is a bit clumsy in this context, so I looked at the source for natatime. I always forget about splice, but there it was :-)

FWIW, this is what I whipped up:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;

sub partn($@)
{
    my $n = shift;
    my @l = @_;
    my @r;
    push @r, [splice( @l, 0, $n )] while @l;
    return @r;
}

## examples
my @r = (1,5,7,9,32,197,8,4,5);

my @r2 = partn 2, @r;
my @r3 = partn 3, @r;
my @r4 = partn 4, @r;

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 0;

print Dumper \@r2;
print Dumper \@r3;
print Dumper \@r4;

__END__
$VAR1 = [[1,5],[7,9],[32,197],[8,4],[5]];
$VAR1 = [[1,5,7],[9,32,197],[8,4,5]];
$VAR1 = [[1,5,7,9],[32,197,8,4],[5]];
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