I worked on the assumption that your path started with a /. The problem sounded like a reverse regex problem to me so thats how I solved it. The other methods are probably better but what the hey :). 
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "/base-dir/dir/foo.txt INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090";
my $string2 = "INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090";

print $string,"\n";
$string = join('',reverse(split('', $string)));
$string =~ s/\s*?(\/|-|\w|\.|\d)+$//; 
$string = join('',reverse(split('', $string)));
print $string,"\n\n";

print $string2,"\n";
$string2 = join('',reverse(split('', $string2)));
$string2 =~ s/\s*?\/(-|\w|\.|\d)+$//; 
$string2 = join('',reverse(split('', $string2)));
print $string2;

[download]

This produced: 
H:\HTML_T~1\perl>perl regex.pl
/base-dir/dir/foo.txt INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090
INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090

INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090
INVALID ORDER-NO 4546090

[download]
HTH,

Simon

In reply to Re: A poor bloke and his regex... by simon.proctor
in thread A poor bloke and his regex... by vek

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.