I am stuck on a program. I am working through a perl book and as an exercize in regular expressions it told me to create a regular expression that test tested for any number of backslashes followed by any number of asterisks. My if statement seems to return true for every string, regardless of whether it meets the desired criteria. I have researched and I have not found any examples that would help me fix my program. Here is my code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict ;
while (<>) {
    if ($_ = /\\*\**/) {
        print "Your string has at least one a and any number of bs.\n"
+ ;
        last ;
    }
    else {
        print "Your string does not match.\n" ;
        last ;
    }
}

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*Ignore the response in the if statement. That was from an earlier program and I Just realized that I haven't updated it to say "Your string has zero or more \s and zero or more *s"

In reply to Regular expression queston by Socrates440

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