One final addition to toolic and davido's posts:

You might as well make it match {0,} instead of {1,} so that strings that start with / will equal the empty string instead of undef.

This way you can avoid "Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.)" warnings.

use warnings;
use strict;

my $thing = 'foo/bar/goo';
my ($stuff) = $thing =~ m{^([^/]*)};
print "$stuff\n";

__END__

foo
[download]