My personal preference for this problem would be to match 
/^\s*use\s+/

[download]
or something along those lines. i'd use word boundary regexes when you need to tokenize whole lines of text into word units or similar. Have you tried at least to use your original regex without the initial word boundary, as per my earlier suggestion?
if still not working..it's just a matter of running a single line of code with the regex, directly against any example .pl files you want to try. try and try again, adjusting the regex, until you get results you want. then put this regex in your script. sorry but i don't have regular access to perl as i type, at the moment.
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H

In reply to Re^3: Directory Tree Help! by aquarium
in thread Directory Tree Help! by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.