Hmm, it looks like (with the parens, sorry about the typo) $1 is not undef but left to an old value if there is no match?!

So I do need to put something on the first line to test for success failure, at least. (or update the regex to make $1 success but blank)

My ugly one line is:

 my $sigil= ($name =~ s/^([$@%&<*])//) ? $1  : '&';
[download]

as I couldn't get it to work with my ($sigil)= ... in list context to return matches. I guess that doesn't work with replacements as opposed to matches.

—John