G'day perl_5eeker,

Welcome to the Monastery.

"Relatively new to perl, ..."

You appear to have resolved your immediate problem. These are just a few tips you might find useful in the future.

You can often avoid many intermediate variables. for, split, and many other functions, use $_ as a default variable. You can access an element of a list returned by a function directly like this: (function)[index]. So you could've pushed the data you wanted with one line; something like this:

$ perl -E '                                               
    my @x = qw{a,b,c d,e,f g,h,i};
    my @y;                         
    push @y, (split /,/)[1] for @x;
    say for @y;
'
b
e
h
[download]

Also, instead of calling push multiple times, you could've generated the wanted list with map and assigned it directly:

$ perl -E '
    my @x = qw{a,b,c d,e,f g,h,i};
    my @y = map((split /,/)[1], @x);
    say for @y;
'
b
e
h
[download]

I think that second line would look somewhat cleaner as:

my @y = map +(split /,/)[1], @x;
[download]

However, using a unary plus for disambiguation seems to cause confusion for many. I'll leave you to decide whatever works best for you.

That may, or may not, be useful in your current situation. Add it to your toolbox for possble future use.

Finally, as I can't see it mentioned by anyone else, when working with CSV data, consider using Text::CSV. That's usually what I'd reach for first in that situation. Also, if you have Text::CSV_XS installed, it will run faster.