Dang, you are correct! I never write $foo =~ $pat so as the
seeker of wisdom needed to be using this construct I *quickly*
checked it to see if it worked using the code posted.

As you rightly point out although this appeared to work
in my quick test if I had also tested this:

$pat = m/foo/;
print "big snafu, egg on face, whoops\n" if "bar" =~ $pat;

then my error would have stared me in the face! Thanks for
pointing out the error, I hate to post wrong advice and 
usually run a quick test first. Ah well, another day at the 
monestry, another snippet of wisdom on the road to 
enlightenment.

As a result the original code will need a qr/$pat/ to work.

head bowed, duly chastened :-(

tachyon

PS this is what you need to get it to work. Trust me ;-)

$pat = qr/some pattern here/;
...
...
...

sub paramCheck
  # Returns "" if no error or description of problem(s).
  {
    ...
    my $pat = shift;
    ...
    ...
    if ( $val !~ m/$pat/ ) { 
        $err .= wes( "$lbl contains invalid characters; " . 
                     "it can only hold $msg." );
    }
  return $err;
}