Reading perlre, I see this:

  1. \ Quote the next metacharacter
  2. ^ Match the beginning of the line
(Emphasis mine.) It then goes on to say:
By default, the "^" character is guaranteed to match only the beginning of the string, the "$" character only the end (or before the newline at the end), and Perl does certain optimizations with the assumption that the string contains only one line.
(Emphasis still mine.) That's where I got the "optimisation" part. As to $*, I'm using perl 5.8. The OP didn't mention version of perl, and I've not been paying attention to his posting history to note what version he's been using, so felt free to use whichever perl I had handy.

In reply to Re^3: What it mathches` by Tanktalus
in thread What it mathches` by abubacker

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