Some small remarks to your point 2:

• Using the syntax $text =~ "abc" works perfectly fine, you don't need the m// operator (unless you want to give modifiers like /i). (see perlop) print "match" if "match" =~ 'a.c';
• You don't have to escape the { in this regex, only if it might be mistaken for the meta character then you have to escape {. Even this is OK: print "match" if 'a{2,-1}b' =~ 'a{2,-1}';

In general - as tommyw mentioned together with other important aspects - I'd use the index function for this kind of searching for a fixed string.

-- Hofmator