I think the lack of the line feed was messing me up 'conceptually'. I tried several variations on the pattern, and figured out it was my pattern having \A & \z anchoring it -- when my pathname wasn't really anchored to anything other than unprintables on either end. Sigh.

I didn't include ":\" in my path chars since I wanted to match the *nix style paths, not the dos paths.

Oh well...

Thanks for the hints -- they helped me flesh out what worked from what didn't...