AM,

I believe your regex is ok (your use of $_ may be somewhat mistaken, but that may be just due to a "quickie" example type-up.

On 5.6.1, under Win32, I got the expected result from

echo 5* | perl -e "while (<>) {print $_ if /\d{1,}\*/}"
[download]

No answers for you beyond this...(perhaps I missed something???)

,welchavw