in reply to Line by Line file processing

Tools that may be of use in this are Text::xSV or Text::CSV and knowing about array slicing (see slices in perldata):

use strict; use warnings; my @column = (1 .. 9); my @last3 = @column[-3 .. -1]; print "@last3\n";

Prints:

7 8 9

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel