I've written this but it is not processing the lines correctly.

win, there has been a reply to your post: how to split this on tabs, but if its required to do with regexes, your project condenses to sth. like this:

 ...
 open my $filehandle, '<', 'win.ini' or die "with style $!";
 
 while( <$filehandle> ) {
    if( (my @fields = /^\d+ | [^\t]+/xg) == 8 ) {
       print "all 8 elements found: @fields\n"
    }
 }
 ...
[download]

Regards

mwa

correction: [^\t] replaced [^\s], this is what I used in a small test run (and forgot to modify after this.)