G'day flieckster,

"what is the best way to remove the first and last character, or remove the "" from the variable?" [my emphasis]

If you only need to remove the leading and trailing quotes, and the example data you provided is representative, i.e. no embedded quotes, the easiest and most efficient way to do this would be by using transliteration:

$string =~ y/"//d
[download]

Here's a quick, yet complete, command line example:

$ perl -E 'my $x = q{"654321_1111"}; say $x; $x =~ y/"//d; say $x'
"654321_1111"
654321_1111
[download]