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