Sometimes minimal matching can help a lot.  Imagine you’d like to match
       everything between "foo" and "bar".  Initially, you write something
       like this:

           $_ =  "The food is under the bar in the barn.";
           if ( /foo(.*)bar/ ) {
               print "got <$1>\n";
           }

       Which perhaps unexpectedly yields:

         got <d is under the bar in the >

       That’s because ".*" was greedy, so you get everything between the first
       "foo" and the last "bar".  Here it’s more effective to use minimal
       matching to make sure you get the text between a "foo" and the first
       "bar" thereafter.

           if ( /foo(.*?)bar/ ) { print "got <$1>\n" }
         got <d is under the >