Update: Roy Johnson already said as much over here.

You won't need the special $match logic if you scan @$stuff backwards. An untested revision of your original function:

sub filter_stuff {
  my ($stuff, @patterns) = @_;

  my $i = @$stuff;
  while ($i--) {
    for (@patterns) {
      next unless $stuff->[$i] =~ /$_/;
      splice(@$stuff, $i, 1);
      last;
    }
  }
}
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When splice() removes an item, all the others with higher indexes move down. The loop has already checked $i+1 when it moves into position $i, so you can move on without checking it again.

-- Rocco Caputo - rcaputo@pobox.com - poe.perl.org