OK, maybe I should have given more context: I was trying to strip of the ending of words, do something with the words and put the ending back on, like this:

my ($end) = $word =~ /(e?s)$/ || ('');
... #do something with $word
$word = "$word$end";
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If the word does not end in s/es, I get a warning about uninitialized variables where I append $end - which I wanted to avoid.

I thought about the ternary, but I don't want to evaluate the regex twice.

I simplified the problem because IMO it boils down to the question if I can enforce list context on the part before the ||. But maybe I oversimplified it.

Thanks anyway for the suggestion.

pike