Hello rookie696, and welcome to the Monastery!

In a regex, [^(asdf)] is a character class which says: match one character as long as that character is not a parenthesis or a lower-case ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘d’, or ‘f’. This is not what you want.

^(?!asdf) says: match the beginning of the line not followed by ‘asdf’. This will work, but it uses a negative look-ahead assertion which is overkill for your purpose.

What you want is simply to negate a normal match. For example:

my @files = ...;

for my $file (@files)
{
    download($file) unless $file =~ /^asdf/;
}
[download]

Or, equivalently,

for my $file (@files)
{
    download($file) if $file !~ /^asdf/;
}
[download]

You should read up on regexes. Here are some good references:

• perlretut
• perlrequick
• perlre
• Chapter 6, “Regular Expressions and Matching” of Modern Perl by chromatic (free online).

Hope that helps,