in reply to Splitting on a pattern once

If you want to just split on the 1st :, use split with a LIMIT of 2:
use strict; use warnings; my $s = ' Aggregate: f3050-184-160:EmptyAggr'; my ($first, $rest) = split /:/, $s, 2; print "$first\n"; print "$rest\n"; __END__ Aggregate f3050-184-160:EmptyAggr