I see Strawberry Perl includes MinGW. I do want a command line interpreter and MSYS (which I did use long ago) seems to be appropriate for this

I think you misunderstand a few things.

• MSYS is unix emulation environment. (Cygwin is another one.)

• MinGW is a port of gcc (and other GNU tools) for Windows (not MSYS).

• Strawberry Perl is a Windows build of Perl. It uses MinGW, not MSYS. (Same goes for ActivePerl.)

• If you're using MSYS, you'd best use an MSYS build of Perl. (Similarly for Cygwin.)

• If you're using Windows, you'd best use Strawberry Perl (or ActivePerl).