Here is a generic solution that returns a reference to an array of arrays. You can then output that formatted any way you want. For example if you wanted HTML table rows you could use print '<tr>' . (join '', map { "<td>$_</td>" } @cols) . "</tr>\n";

my @data = 11 .. 42;
my $cols = 7;
my $ref = get_cols( $cols, \@data );

# display the data
for my $row ( @$ref ) {
    my @cols = @$row;
    print "@cols\n";
}

sub get_cols {
    my ( $cols, $data_ref ) = @_;
    my $count = 0;
    my @ary;
    for my $item ( @$data_ref ) {
        $count++ % $cols ? push @{$ary[-1]}, $item : push @ary, [$item
+];
    }
  return \@ary;
}

__DATA__
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35 36 37 38
39 40 41 42
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tachyon

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