This last step in your proposed algorithm seems like too much work:

• Otherwise, assign a score to each matching rule by counting the number of characters consumed by each wildcard. Accept the rule with the lowest score

It should suffice to assign ranking scores to the rules in advance, based on the relative "wildness" allowed by wildcard operators, then apply the rules in their ranked order (most specific to least specific) and invoke the action for the first one that matches.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::Glob 'match_glob';

# let's make up some dummy subroutines
my @actions;
for my $act ( 1 .. 7 ) {
    my $msg = " is handled by action$act\n";
    $actions[$act] = sub { print $_[0], $msg };
}

my %rule = (
 '*' => 1,
 '*.txt' => 2,
 '*.tx?' => 7,
 'fred/*' => 3,
 'fred/*.mac' => 4,
 'george.txt' => 5,
 'fred/george.txt' => 6,
);

my %rankings;
for ( keys %rule ) {
    my $rank = length() * 100 - ( tr/*// ) * 10 - ( tr/?// );
    push @{$rankings{$rank}}, $_;
}

my @rank_order = sort {$b<=>$a} keys %rankings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my $matched;
    for my $rank ( @rank_order ) {
        for my $glob ( @{$rankings{$rank}} ) {
            if ( match_glob( $glob, $_ )) {
                $matched = $rule{$glob};
                last;
            }
        }
        last if $matched;
    }
    if ( $matched ) {
        $actions[$matched]->( $_ );
    }
}

__DATA__
foo.bar
foo.bar.txt
foo.bar.txo
fred/foo.bar
fred/foo.bar.mac
george.txt
fred/george.txt
[download]

I suspect that someone else could come up with a more clever way to assign ranking scores, but the idea above is: longer patterns have higher scores (are more specific) than shorter ones; a pattern of a given length gets the most points if it has no wildcards; it loses 1 point for each "?" and 10 points for each "*". I think this captures the user's expectation.

(It would make sense for patterns with no wildcards to be given a uniform maximum score, but I don't expect this would make a big difference in performance.) ((Update: On second thought, depending on how many file names you're checking and the relative quantities/proportions of exact-match vs. wildcard rules, it might be worthwhile to test all the exact-match rules as a group first, using just eq instead of a call to match_glob, and this would be easy if you assign a uniform, constant max score to all the exact-match rules, regardless of their length.))

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