You're mistaken, and more than once. First, finding lines ending with other-than-double-quote is exactly what was wanted. Next, the regex doesn't have anything to do with the record separator. The dollar sign represents end-of-string, and the slash closes the regex. Finally, you say the code prints any line not ending with double quote, but it actually prints every line it's being fed, regardless of double quotes, because the input lines aren't chomp'ed and [^"] matches the newlines.

Hope that's clear.