No. That would prevent the regex from succeeding at end-of-string. What I want is to prevent the regex from backtracking due to end-of-string. This can happen at any point in the regex so there is no one place in the pattern that you can put something to cause it to happen. It would be like putting a special token at the end of the string such that every part of the regex treats that token specially.
It could/should actually do even more than that. Even "mel" =~ /l+/z should fail because it terminated the search due to the end-of-string and the next bytes on my stream might well be "low" and so I'd want that regex to match both "l"s.
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tye