The result of calling a particular shell command on my local system is the following: 
azxinetgw.EXECFILE_DIR.azxinetgw='/usr/local/instinet/RTS/etc/local/az
+xfiles'

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I wrote the following Perl code to get the value part of the string (the part after the equal sign) using regexes even though split is easier so that I could practice my regexes. Here is my code, yet it does not work (in other words, printing $1 yields an empty string). So it is matching, but $1 is not bound. My regex is saying:
  1. match everything that is not an equal
  2. then match and equal
  3. then match a quote
  4. then match everything that is not a quote and save in $1
  5. then match another quote
But it doesn't seem to work: 
sub get_assigned_dir {

    my $gpa_key = shift;
    my $gpa_ret = `$gpa $gpa_key`;
    warn $gpa_ret;
    if (  $gpa_ret =~ /[^=]+[=][']([^']+)[']/ ) { 
            my $assigned_dir = $1 } 
    else { die "couldn't determine assigned directory for            $
+gpa_key" 
    }
    log_msg "assigned dir for $gpa_key == $assigned_dir";

}

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Also

Also would someone mind telling me why $1 simply has one 'a' in it in the second case? 
$string = 'aaaaa';
print $1,$/ if $string =~ /(a)+/;
print $1,$/ if $string =~ /(a+)/;

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In reply to Regular expression to match an A=B type string needs help in storing matched parts of string by princepawn

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