When you're splitting on any whitespace, you want to use \s+ instead of " ". For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $line = "  0 10  9  4  1  0  0  0  2  2  1  1  0";
my @config = split /\s+/, $line;
for (@config) {
    next unless $_ =~ /\w+/;
    print $_, "\n";
}
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which has the output:

C:\Code>perl split_num.pl
0
10
9
4
1
0
0
0
2
2
1
1
0
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Please note that with leading whitespace in $line, the first element returned by split won't contain any text, so you have to trap for that.