This volume presents the proceedings of the Fifth 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 Bio-Informatics. Combinatorial Pattern Matching addresses issues of searching and matching of strings and more complicated patterns, as for example trees. The goal is to derive non-trivial combinatorial properties for such structures and then to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. In recent years, combinatorial pattern matching has developed into a full-fledged area of algorithmics and is expected to grow even further during the next years.