Hello vis29, and welcome to the Monastery!

The code shown applies the regex to whatever string is currently stored in the default variable $_, and if the regex matches it assigns the string "not recognized" to the scalar variable $uname.

The regex says:

• ^ — starting at the beginning of the string
• $hash — match the current value of the scalar variable $hash
• followed by the literal string 'server'
• and capture the word 'server' if a match is found.

I’m guessing that the code doesn’t do (anything like) what was intended, but without seeing the surrounding context it’s hard to say exactly what that was. Here is one guess:

$uname = "not recognized" unless exists $hash{server};
[download]

Hope that helps,