Yes, but then, mine worked. :) Just kidding.

You're just pushing each line arbitrarily onto @recs--you need to group them in sets of 5, because that's what the original file looked like. Plus why are you using foreach in the original reading-in-the-file loop? That

foreach my $line (<FH>)
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reads the entire file into a temp array--not a horrible thing in many cases, but still, if we can process on a line by line basis, we may as well do so. :)

I like your use of split quite a lot, though.

So, combining your ideas and mine:

use strict;

 open FH, "foo" or die "Can't open: $!";
 my @recs;
 while (<FH>) {
     chomp;
     push @{$recs[int(($.-1) / 5)]}, split /,?\s/;
 }
 close FH or die "Can't close: $!";

 open FH, ">foo.new" or die "Can't open: $!";
 print FH map join('|', @$_) . "\n", @recs;
 close FH;
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Notice I took the array slice out--I think the op wanted everything in the array. If not, though, he/she should stick it back in, just

@$ref[0..4]
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instead of

@$ref
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And I'm now using map, just cause map is great.