As I was investigating this I found that if you leave out the '$' in the regex the script works "more correctly". Since '-' isn't caught by \w the output is as follows 

<abc><def>
<xyz><6>
<123><456>

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-----------------------------------
Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://frank.wiles.org

In reply to Re: partial results in $1 $2 after re failure by ides
in thread partial results in $1 $2 after re failure by Anonymous Monk

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