What I'm trying to accomplish is to pull a name from the list and print it out. I have done this various ways, but I'm trying to do this as requested in chapter 8, exercise #3 in the 'Learning Pearl' book by O'Reilly. I have corrected all of the typos that were pointed out,(very humbling that I did not pick up on that). I am still running into problems.

 
#!/bin/perl
use v5.12;
use warnings;


     my $Namelist  = 'Wilma Fred Barney Betty Dino';

       if ( $Namelist =~  m/(\w+a)/  {
          print "Matched|$<$&$>|\n";
          say "The name that matched was $1 \n";
       }  else {
          print "No match: \n";
          } 
 syntax error at ./exer_8_3 line 8, near "m/(\w+a)/  {"
 syntax error at ./exer_8_3 line 11, near "}"
[download]

Catfish, you still have a typo: you dropped the closing parenthesis for the if() block.

use v5.12;
use warnings;


my $Namelist  = 'Wilma Fred Barney Betty Dino';

if ( $Namelist =~  m/(\w+a)/ ) {
    print "Matched|$<$&$>|\n";
    say "The name that matched was $1 \n";
}  else {
    print "No match: \n";
}
[download]

This code results in:

Matched|0Wilma0|
The name that matched was Wilma
[download]

Note the strange "0" before and after "Wilma". I am in Windows, so I don't get a $< UID or a $> EUID. As I pointed out, those varibles make no sense in the context of trying to print matched output. When I asked what you "what were you trying to do with those", I was trying to get clarification of what you wanted your output to look like. Were you trying to have angle brackets literally used in your output? like:

Matched|<Wilma>|
The name that matched was Wilma
[download]

That would be accomplished with print "Matched|<$&>|\n";

Or were you trying to have literal dollar signs and literal angle brackets? like:

Matched|$<Wilma>$|
The name that matched was Wilma
[download]

That would be accomplished with print "Matched|\$<$&\$>|\n";

Or did you just really want Wilma to be printed between the vertical bars? like:

Matched|Wilma|
The name that matched was Wilma
[download]

That would be accomplished with print "Matched|$&|\n";

Or did you really want the linux user-id number ($<) and effective user-id number ($>) to surround Wilma? like:

Matched|###Wilma###|
The name that matched was Wilma
[download]

(where ### are actual numbers, not the number-signs I have shown): That would be accomplished with print "Matched|$<$&$>|\n";

       if ( $Namelist =~  m/(\w+a)/  {

You have opened 2 sets of brackets but only closed one.

if ( $Namelist =~ m/(\w+a)/ ) {
[download]

Thanks for all PerlMonks that posted, (yet another stupid typo). I am forever in your debt.

I'm not sure what you're using to edit, but a good text editor with color-coding and highlighting can be really useful in avoiding this stuff and tracking it down when it happens.

I use Notepad++ and Vim (when I have to edit via an SSH terminal). I've heard good things about Visual Studio Code too