If you're truly concerned about speed, use a /o modifier to compile the regex once, rather than re-interpolating the variable each time the regex is fired.

You'll also need to fix the regex to avoid false positives. Here's how I do it:

  my $re = "\A(?:"
         . join("|", $foo, $bar, $baz)
         . ")\Z";
  ...
  if ( /$re/o ) { ... }
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