spawns an additional process, and it's shell rather then perl ...
## print the last word only if the string end with a letter
$a = 'bla lbval asdas lasdasd lastword';
$a =~ /(\w*)$/;
print "$1\n";
## print the last sequence of non white space characters
$a = 'bla lbval asdas lasdasd lastword.';
$a =~ /(\S*)$/;
print "$1\n";