RegEx: odd number of slashes? and too many slashes?

Why does the following code work to find the literal UNC path specified. altPath should have worked, right? It looks like the regex engine is gobbling up slashes!! Perl 5.x


#my $altPath = '\\\\websrv\\VMServer\\cvs\\SAMS\\archives';
my $rootPath = '\\\\\\\websrv\\\VMServer\\\cvs\\\SAMS\\\archives';

# load the list of obsolete files
sub loadObsoletes {
my $i = 0;
my $line;
open SRC, $src_name or die "Can't open file '$src_name'";
while (<SRC>) {
chomp;
/$rootPath(.+?)-arc - (.+)/o; # extract the filenames into an array
print "Matched: <$`> $& <$'>\n";
print "Parsed line $i as: {$1}{$2}\n" if $verbose;
$line = $1;
$line =~ s[\\][/]g;
print "Subst as: {$line}\n" if $verbose;
$LoF[$i] = $line;
$i++;
}
close SRC;
print "Listed source file as: @LoF" if $verbose;
}


Thnx,
Dan
.