in reply to Regex to match last n characters of a string

If you enable warnings you'll see 

Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/(.*{ <-- HERE 41}
+)$/ a

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Which tells you that your regex should be 

/(.{41})$/

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Note the absence of '*'.

Alternatively, you could also use 

$last_41 = substr $buffer, -41;

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