Addditionally, don't post code that doesn't match your problem statement.

Long before you got to the problem with the unescaped forward slashes and missing paren, you would have seen numerous messages from strict and warnings -- yet you make no mention of those.

If you saw and understood them, you should have fixed them before posting, rather than leaving them as wild-geese for the Monks to chase.

And, casual (and perhaps also "cynical") inspection leads me to wonder if you're trying to test regular expressions or perhaps you're trying to crack passwords; if so, that would be beyond merely abusive. In any case, this script seems a most peculiar methodology for testing regexen, as suggested by your title and bluntly asserted in your narrative.