Thanks hippo.. I was not aware of the Test::More library, I do think that it works to explain what I was looking to do pretty well

I included the tests with the working and non working regex 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More;


my $regex = "/pce_rx_n1/";

like( "pce_rx_n1", $regex, "Matching my regex" );
like( "pce_rx_n1_blah", $regex, "Matching my regex" );
#
#these fail because my $regex matches n1 and n10 and n13
#
unlike( "pce_rx_n13", $regex, "Not Matching my regex" );
unlike( "pce_rx_n10_blah", $regex, "Not Matching my regex" );

#fix the regex with the 
#zero look-ahead negative assertion
$regex = "/pce_rx_n1(?!\\d)/";

like( "pce_rx_n1", $regex, "Matching my regex" );
like( "pce_rx_n1_blah", $regex, "Matching my regex" );
unlike( "pce_rx_n12", $regex, "Not Matching my regex" );
unlike( "pce_rx_n10_blah", $regex, "Not Matching my regex" );

done_testing;

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In reply to Re^2: regular expression to match specific members of a bus_name by boleary
in thread regular expression to match specific members of a bus_name by boleary

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