It is just what OP asked for. If OP wanted to match more or less then:

s/(.*ing)((?!bob|fred|bill)\w+?)(more|less)/$1HIT$3/

does the trick.

Note that OP says:

Im getting stuck specifying 'not' - OK with a caracter class, ( ie ^some chars ) - but not when using parenthesis to define multiple 'words'
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^3: Negating a regexp by GrandFather
in thread Negating a regexp by jxh

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