The problem with your code is that the print statement is outside of the foreach loop (its outside of the curly braces which define the extent of the loop). To get it to print the second field on each line, this statement should be inside the loop so that it gets called for each line.

# type value   value2
#  503  1093    4395

# load the data
@file = <FILE>;
# or use a while (defined(my $line = <FILE>)) { loop

for my $line (@file) { # for is the same as foreach
  my @fields = split (/\s+/, $line); # @file was being reused
  print "$fields[2]\n";
}
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--
integral, resident of freenode's #perl

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