Another variation that's useful if the elements of the array itself are large and therefore costly to shuffle or perhaps more importantly, if its necessary to keep the array in it's original order.

Instead of shuffling the array, create and shuffle an array of indexes, then subset it to produce a slice from the real array.

#! perl -sw
use strict;

sub shufl (\@) { my $r=pop; $a = $_ + rand @{$r} - $_ and @$r[$_, $a] 
+= @$r[$a, $_] for (0..$#{$r}); }

my @array = qw(the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and went st
+raight into a puddle);

my @indexes = (0..$#array);
shufl(@indexes);

my ($comp1, $comp2, $comp3, $comp4, $comp5) = @array[@indexes[0..4]];

print"$comp1, $comp2, $comp3, $comp4, $comp5\n";

__END__
#Ouput
C:\test>210389.pl
jumps, dog, a, the, fox

C:\test>210389.pl
a, the, lazy, brown, into

C:\test>210389.pl
and, quick, a, puddle, fox

C:\test>210389.pl
a, and, the, the, into

C:\test>210389.pl
dog, jumps, went, the, straight

C:\test>210389.pl
lazy, quick, and, into, fox

C:\test>210389.pl
the, went, the, brown, over

C:\test>
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