Since awk and perl are closely related...
Perl equivalents of @Dennis's awk solutions:
To print the second line:
perl -ne 'print if $. == 2' file
To print the second field:
perl -lane 'print $F[1]' file
To print the third field of the fifth line:
perl -lane 'print $F[2] if $. == 5' file
Perl equivalent of @Glenn's solution:
Print the j'th field of the i'th line
perl -lanse 'print $F[$j-1] if $. == $i' -- -i=5 -j=3 file
Perl equivalents of @Hai's solutions:
if you are looking for second columns that contains abc:
perl -lane 'print if $F[1] =~ /abc/' foo
... and if you want to print only a particular column:
perl -lane 'print $F[2] if $F[1] =~ /abc/' foo
... and for a particular line number:
perl -lane 'print $F[2] if $F[1] =~ /abc/ && $. == 5' foo
-l removes newlines, and adds them back in when printing
-a autosplits the input line into array @F, using whitespace as the delimiter
-n loop over each line of the input file
-e execute the code within quotes
$F[1] is the second element of the array, since Perl starts at 0
$. is the line number