Could somebody please explain why the expected message is not printed from the code below. I assumed that the regex will return true when a replacement is done, but it makes the replacement and returns false

I assume it has to do with the value being a textvariable

Workaround is simple

    my $target = $CFG{target} ;
    if ( $target  =~ s/bar//xms ) {
        warn "expecting this message\n";
        $CFG{target} = $target;
    } else {
        warn "not expecting this message\n";
    }
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