For the sake of a shorter program, one less function call, a negated regexp and completely ignoring the one-liner posted Corion very early in this thread

use strict;
use warnings;
my $location = "some location";
my $dirchar = "\\";
$location = $location.$dirchar if ($location !~ /{$dirchar}$/);
print "Hier ist es : ".$location."\n";
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I may have approached the problem the same way as you are when I first started learning Perl. Now I would tend to use the above. I don't find regexp's easy but perlrequick is a good starting point before moving on to doc::/perlre and Mastering Regular Expressions