Hmm. Thanks for that. May be Solaris only then. I will mention that in the report. The build is pretty vanilla. Any Solaris users out there? (Note that it works fine for me also with 5.6.1 on Solaris.)

Kevin

Works fine here as well.. heres my info:
Solaris 8 (420R)


[3:24pm] 11 [~]:msp-mainserver% perl -V
Summary of my perl5 (revision 5.0 version 8 subversion 0) configuratio
+n:
  Platform:
    osname=solaris, osvers=2.8, archname=sun4-solaris
    uname='sunos solaris 5.8 generic_108528-11 sun4u sparc sunw,ultra-
+5_10 '
    config_args='-Dcc=gcc -B/usr/ccs/bin/'
    hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
    usethreads=undef use5005threads=undef useithreads=undef usemultipl
+icity=undef
    useperlio=define d_sfio=undef uselargefiles=define usesocks=undef
    use64bitint=undef use64bitall=undef uselongdouble=undef
    usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef
  Compiler:
    cc='gcc -B/usr/ccs/bin/', ccflags ='-fno-strict-aliasing -D_LARGEF
+ILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64',
    optimize='-O',
    cppflags='-fno-strict-aliasing'
    ccversion='', gccversion='3.1', gccosandvers='solaris2.8'
    intsize=4, longsize=4, ptrsize=4, doublesize=8, byteorder=4321
    d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=1
+6
    ivtype='long', ivsize=4, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t',
+ lseeksize=8
    alignbytes=8, prototype=define
  Linker and Libraries:
    ld='gcc -B/usr/ccs/bin/', ldflags =' -L/usr/local/lib '
    libpth=/usr/local/lib /usr/lib /usr/ccs/lib
    libs=-lsocket -lnsl -lgdbm -ldl -lm -lc
    perllibs=-lsocket -lnsl -ldl -lm -lc
    libc=/lib/libc.so, so=so, useshrplib=false, libperl=libperl.a
    gnulibc_version=''
  Dynamic Linking:
    dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=so, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags=' '
    cccdlflags='-fPIC', lddlflags='-G -L/usr/local/lib'


Characteristics of this binary (from libperl): 
  Compile-time options: USE_LARGE_FILES
  Built under solaris
  Compiled at Jul 22 2002 02:55:19
  @INC:
    /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/sun4-solaris
    /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0
    /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/sun4-solaris
    /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0
    /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl
[download]


-Waswas

This is starting to get interesting! I am also using Solaris 8. Now, we may have used slightly different build options, gcc versions and Solaris patch levels, but it seems unlikely that this should make a difference.

Can you confirm that you did not see the dollar sign at the end of the regex?

It is worth mentioning that I found the behaviour to be highly sporadic (though not over different executions of the same code - in other words, highly sensitive to the particular regex). For example, if I remove a single element from the regex, all is well. Also, I observed occasions where adding a second line saying my $re = qw'whatever';, identical to the first, would cause the error to disappear. Finally, I saw similar behaviour using Perl v5.8.0 built with symbolic information retained, but different extraneous characters were appended to the regex, using the same code.

Kevin

Just got home. It works fine for me on Linux as well. So, clearly something specific to the environment at work.

Cheers, Kevin