While both, jettero & imp, have provided perfectly suitable solutions for aligning two or more values using a formatstring, you perhaps might be interested what format offers, especially if you become interested in having multiple values output in a formatted way, where, for example, the alignment differs from value to value.

Example code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @elems = qw(left centered right);

format =
------------------------------------------
@<<<<<<<<<<<<< @||||||||||| @>>>>>>>>>>>>>
@elems
------------------------------------------
.

write;
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outputs

------------------------------------------
left             centered            right
------------------------------------------
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Update: Added code.