You really want File::Basename, which is made for file/directory manipulation.

But for regular expressions, you want what is called an anchor. There are two (well, technically four) of them: ^ anchors the match to the start of the string, and $ anchors it to the end (see perlre). So your problem could be solved by:

my $file = "c:/progra~1/apache~1/apache2/cgi-bin/test/new/Feb23-2006_0
+_test_error.txt";
if ($file =~ m!^(.*)/(\w+\.txt)$!) {
  print "Found $1 - $2\n";
} else {
  print "No match found for '$file'\n";
};
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