trying to match words from a list of alternates. The problem is that I cannot seem to stop the match at the root word.

ex: 

$words = "(directory|file|age|action)";

while (<>){
   if ( $_ !~ /$words/ ){
       print "Could not find $_ in \$words\n";
   }
}

[download]

This works for the most part. If I enter a word that is not in the $word var the block executes. If I enter in 'directorys' the block executes, but if I enter in 'directoryy' the block does not execute.

I think that this is due to the fact that perl is greedy by default on matches. To fix this I tried changing the match to: 

   if ( $_ !~ /$words?/ ){

[download]

This did not work, as a matter of fact, it made it so that the code block never executed. Any help is appreciated.

TIA, Chad.

In reply to regex question by gnu@perl

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