"Maybe I should have posted it with strict & warnings included, and asked why I'm getting the errors."

I concur with ++eyepopslikeamosquito's comments: that would have been a far better way to deal with this.

Removing those pragmata from your code does not remove whatever problem they reported. This is basically just putting your head in the sand: it neither helps you nor helps us to help you.

What you can do is look for the exception message in perldiag. Admittedly, in this instance, the description for "Use of uninitialized value %s" will not be all that helpful, unless you really don't understand that message: but, as I said earlier, "it would have hinted at a starting point for investigating the issue". In many cases, however, the expanded explanation in perldiag can be quite enlightening.

Another option you have is to use the diagnostics pragma. Be aware that this can be somewhat overwhelming and leave you feeling that you're drowning in exception output. You can get multiple, often large, blocks of text; however, just as a simple example, consider a typo where you didn't release the shift key quickly enough after typing a " and ended up typing a : instead of a ; as the next character:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -Mdiagnostics -e 'my $x = "X": print "$x\n"
+;'
syntax error at -e line 1, near ""X":"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors (#1)
    (F) Probably means you had a syntax error.  Common reasons include
+:

        A keyword is misspelled.
        A semicolon is missing.
        A comma is missing.
        An opening or closing parenthesis is missing.
        An opening or closing brace is missing.
        A closing quote is missing.

    Often there will be another error message associated with the synt
+ax
    error giving more information.  (Sometimes it helps to turn on -w.
+)
    The error message itself often tells you where it was in the line 
+when
    it decided to give up.  Sometimes the actual error is several toke
+ns
    before this, because Perl is good at understanding random input.
    Occasionally the line number may be misleading, and once in a blue
+ moon
    the only way to figure out what's triggering the error is to call
    perl -c repeatedly, chopping away half the program each time to se
+e
    if the error went away.  Sort of the cybernetic version of 20 ques
+tions.

Uncaught exception from user code:
        syntax error at -e line 1, near ""X":"
        Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
[download]

Also note that the diagnostics pragma is a developer tool; it is not (normally) appropriate for production code. Remove use diagnostics; (and similar code) when moving from the development to the production environments.

> Maybe I should have posted it with strict & warnings included, and asked why I'm getting the errors

Yes!

Even more important, read and understand the basic Perl documentation for the functions you are using. If your program does not behave the way the Perl documentation says it should, mention that in your question. For example, the Perl documentation for split says this, yet I am seeing that. (Based on your question, I don't see how you could have read and understood the documentation for split).

In summary, please read and attempt to understand the Perl documentation and test your code with strict and warnings before posting.