This volume presents the proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held at Asilomar, California, in June 1994. The 26 selected papers in this volume are organized in chapters on alignments, various matchings, combinatorial aspects and bioinformatics. The contributors address such issues as the searching and matching of strings and more complicated patterns. The goal of the conference was to derive nontrivial combinatorial properties for such structures and then to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems.