Astonishing.

Well, now I have learned that explicitly setting the :unix layer is, depending on the situation, either evil or useless, I have to say that I indeed found a case where it seems to work in the way I originally intended: When it comes to creating a file, and we leave out the possibilities I mentioned, and the ones you added, and write it in the :unix layer way, i.e.

use strict;
use warnings;
open(my $fh,'>:unix','abc.txt') or die $!; 
print $fh "one line\n"
[download]

we find that, after running this program on Windows, the line terminator of the file is LF (not CRLF). Different to reading a file, :unix layer seems to make sense here. Even unlinking the file works:

use strict;
use warnings;
open(my $fh,'>:unix','abc.txt') or die $!; 
print $fh "one line\n"
close $fh;
# No error message on unlink
unlink 'abc.txt' or die $!;
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However, this works only if we don't use binmode for setting the layer. The following fails:

use strict;
use warnings;
open(my $fh,'>','abc.txt') or die $!; 
binmode($fh,':unix');
print $fh "one line\n"
close $fh;
# Error message on unlink
unlink 'abc.txt' or die $!;
[download]

This confirms the theory that the problem is not the setting of the :unix layer as such, nor the use of binmode for setting a layer, but the combination of both. Indeed, if we replace in the last example :unix by, say, :crlf or :raw, we don't get an error message.

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