which loses characters if the string length is not an exact multiple of 10 (may not be a problem in this case?) One solution-

my @a = unpack('A10' x (length($string)/10) . 'A' . length($string)%10
+,$string);
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--
my $chainsaw = 'Perl';

#or
my @a = $string=~/(.{1,10})/gs;
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