Jack Tanner wrote:
> Thank you all for the responses. Off to play with cl-ppcre I go.

And it works beautifully.

Here's a quick-and-dirty howto for anyone who'd like to do the same (on 
RedHat 9 with ACL 6.2 with all patches applied)...

A. as root:
1. wget http://weitz.de/files/cl-ppcre.tgz
2. tar xzf cl-ppcre.tgz
3. mkdir /usr/local/cl-ppcre
4. mv cl-ppcre-0.7.1 /usr/local/cl-ppcre
5. alisp -L /usr/local/cl-ppcre/cl-ppcre-0.7.1/load.lisp -kill

B. as user, in alisp:
1. (cl-ppcre-test:test) "It should exactly report three 'errors' (662, 
790, and 1439)" (README) which are explained at 
http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/#perl.
2. (cl-ppcre:scan "(a)*b" "xaaabd") and off you go.

Thank you, Edi!

-JT