It matches for me, but not as you want it to. Your regex is too relaxed. The (.*?) tries to match zero characters first (and succeeds). The \s*? tries to match zero whitespace (and succeeds). The (.*?$) tries matching zero characters (and fails), and eventually ends up matching the whole line. Boo.

You want something like /(.*?)\s+(.*)/, or perhaps /(\S+)\s+(.*)/. Better yet, use split(). my ($ng, $desc) = split ' ', $record, 2;

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;