I was trying to do the following: 
$whatisit = system "whatis grep";
$whatisit =~ s/.*-//;
print $whatisit;

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Which didn't work, but if I test the regex with the actual output of whatis, then it does work:
$x = "grep           (1)  - print lines matching a pattern";
$x =~ s/.*-//; 
print $x;

[download]

This returns everything after the dash, which is what I want.

In reply to How do I use a regex to parse $x = system by Anonymous Monk

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