This note is to echo what ikegami said- This is one of the most important things you have to do as you learn perl.. 'use strict;' - use that. Just believe..

Here's your script rewritten with strict.. (untested)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;


open (FILE, 'data.txt');
while (<FILE>) {
   chomp;
   my ($name, $email, $phone) = split(/\s/); # split on whitespace
   print "Name: $name\n";
   print "Email: $email\n";
   print "Phone: $phone\n";
   print "---------\n";
}
close (FILE);
exit;
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