To add to the excellent advice by Athanasius, now would also be a good time to learn about grep:

my @downloads = grep { !/^asdf$/ } @file_list;

print "Downloading: @downloads\n";

[download]

It's also worth noting that if you truly want to exclude a literal string, you don't need a regex at all, so you could also do:

my @downloads = grep { $_ ne 'asdf' } @file_list;

This works just as well if asdf is in a variable.

my $exclude   = 'asdf'; # Maybe user input or other program logic
my @downloads =  grep { $_ ne $exclude } @file_list;

[download]
use strict; use warnings; omitted for brevity.

In reply to Re: understanding regex by rjt
in thread understanding regex by rookie696

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