On perl 5.10 (and later), your script should work the same with the $* as without the $*. The deprecation message is letting you know that it has no effect. So, if you want to get rid of the warning message, you can just comment out the $* line:

#        $* = 1;
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Note that it is a warning, not an error. Is your script working as desired on 5.10?

You could check to see if your script still works on 5.8 without $*.

The problem with the $* variable is that it is global. Once set, it will apply to all regular expressions in code executed after it is set. If there are any regexes outside of your posted code, they could be affected, too.

See also $* and perdiag