The 'atomic' extended pattern  "(?>pattern)" (available in 5.8) will give you possessiveness around the entire pattern or any sub-pattern of your choosing. See Extended Patterns in perlre. (The following example doesn't really illustrate atomic/possessive matching; for a good discussion and pertinent examples, see the docs.) 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"print qq{perl ver. $]};
 my $rx = qr{ ((?> \d+)) }xms;
 'abc1234def' =~ $rx;
 print qq{'$1'};
"
perl ver. 5.008009
'1234'

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In reply to Re: Perl Complains of Nested Quantifiers by AnomalousMonk
in thread Perl Complains of Nested Quantifiers by sunmaz

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