in reply to Processing files column-wise

I cannot figure out what the end result is you are aiming for (you lost me after "starting from the tenth column"). But if you want to cut out the first 9 columns of a file, use the cut utility. For instance (untested):
use autodie; open my $fh, "cut 1-9 -d ' ' $file1 $file2 $file3 $file4 |"; while (<$fh>) { my @columns = split ' '; ... Do something with 9 columns ... }