Because my with a conditional is buggy (and makes no sense). In your case, the following will do nicely: 
my ($var) = $filecontents =~ /SOME_REGEX(.*?)$/g;
if (defined $var) {
   ... proceed w/ usage of $var
}

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In reply to Re^5: getting a regex to return an array of matches? by ikegami
in thread getting a regex to return an array of matches? by rmexico

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