in Perl regex... what is the behaviour of an asterisk with no preceding token????

Its an error

$ perl -le " /*/"
Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HER
+E / at -e line 1.
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also matches!!!!!!!!! WHY????

I don't think it does that.

You should post real code with real output from that code that shows * matching something and not generating an error.