Article 10951 of comp.lang.perl:
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From: olson@raptor.mcs.anl.gov (Bob Olson)
Subject: Re: anlpasswd parenthesis matching problem
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Organization: Argonne National Lab, Mathematics & Computer Science Division
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Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 14:07:25 GMT
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In article <2kgivb$37u@gap.cco.caltech.edu> napalm@gluttony.ugcs.caltech.edu (K. Bruner) writes:
>We have anlpasswd installed here, and one of our users gets this error
>when trying to change his password to one with an unmatched parenthesis:
>/xxxxxxx/: unmatched () in regexp at {path deleted}/perl/passwd line 6
>42, <STDIN> line 2.

That is a bug in an earlier version of anlpasswd. You can pick up a
new version from info.mcs.anl.gov in pub/systems/anlpasswd-2.2.tar.Z.
It has further enhancements and bugfixes.

In the meantime, add this line before the test you quoted:

    $pass =~ s/[\\()*.|\$^+\[\]]/\\$&/g;

--bob