ikegami already linked to the docs and provided two solutions.

I just want to point out, that you are using the quantifier * as first character in your expression, which can't work, because a quantifier must follow another expression (character, character class, group, ...). Refer to the docs for more details.

$ perl -wle ' q~hello~ =~ m/*ello/ and print "yeah";'
Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HER
+E ello/ at -e line 1.
$ perl -wle ' q~hello~ =~ m/.*ello/ and print "yeah";'
yeah
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