You have to make sure that you reset pos($str) if you use this more than once otherwise it continues from the last match.

However, for reasons that I cannot explain, this method steadfastly refuses to match beyond position 21165. Ask for any match after that and (on my system) the script quietly self terminates. No segault. No panic. No message at all.

Is this a bug worthy of reporting or am I missing something here?

#! perl -w
use strict;

my $str = 'a' x 100000;
my $char = 'a';

for my $n ( map{ $_ * 1000 + 165 } 1 .. 30 ) {
    pos($str)=0;
    $str =~ /(?:.*?$char){$n}/g;
    print "Pos of '$char' #$n in \$str is ", pos($str), "\n";
}

__END__
C:\test>junk
Pos of 'a' #1165 in $str is 1165
Pos of 'a' #2165 in $str is 2165
Pos of 'a' #3165 in $str is 3165
Pos of 'a' #4165 in $str is 4165
Pos of 'a' #5165 in $str is 5165
Pos of 'a' #6165 in $str is 6165
Pos of 'a' #7165 in $str is 7165
Pos of 'a' #8165 in $str is 8165
Pos of 'a' #9165 in $str is 9165
Pos of 'a' #10165 in $str is 10165
Pos of 'a' #11165 in $str is 11165
Pos of 'a' #12165 in $str is 12165
Pos of 'a' #13165 in $str is 13165
Pos of 'a' #14165 in $str is 14165
Pos of 'a' #15165 in $str is 15165
Pos of 'a' #16165 in $str is 16165
Pos of 'a' #17165 in $str is 17165
Pos of 'a' #18165 in $str is 18165
Pos of 'a' #19165 in $str is 19165
Pos of 'a' #20165 in $str is 20165
Pos of 'a' #21165 in $str is 21165
[download]