line input doesn't recognize ^M end of line character

I'm working on a Linux computer with perl-5.004-1 and trying to input an ascii data file that was created on a Macintosh computer. The file is
huge and is composed of columns of 3 rows each. The problem is
that the Macintosh newline character (^M) does not seem to be recognized
by Perl as such.  So, when I try to do something like:

         while ($line=<INPUT_FILE>) {
            chop $line;
            @values=split(/ /,$line); #store columns in values array
            print SEGMENTED_FILE "$values[1]\n";
          }

in which I'm attempting to read in the file line by line and output column
1 to SEGMENTED_FILE, it doesn't work (It attempts to read in the entire
file as one line). If it was a Unix data file with a proper newline
character it works fine.

        So, my question is how do I get around this. If I was writing it
in C, then I know that I could read in one field at a time, and just deal
with it that way. In Perl can I do that? Or is there a way to get Perl to
recognize the ^M character as end of line? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Dave