I'm having a problem trying to get a regular expression to
work for checking a long password. The long password consist
of an access code plus any combination of numbers, upper or
lower case letters, or the underscore(_). The total length of the long password must be at least 5 characters and cannot exceed 16 characters. The regular expression I use below doesn't seem to work. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong. Knowing me it's probably something simple. Thanks in advance for your help.


#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;              # enforce declarations and quoting
use diagnostics;         # hints for errors

my $acode = "1234";

print "Type in your long password\n";
my $lngpswd = <STDIN>;
chomp($lngpswd);

print "\$lngpswd = $lngpswd\n";

my $result = $lngpswd =~ /^$acode\w{5,16}/ ? "OK" : "NO";
   print "\$result = $result\n";
   

   if ( $result eq "OK" )
   {
      print "$lngpswd is a good long password\n";
   }
   else
   {                                           
      print "$lngpswd is an invalid Long Password!\n";   
   }