However, I don't have a Windows machine with Perl handy to test with so I do not know if it will also work there.

I couldn't get your example to work on Windows 7 with Strawberry Perl-5.32.0:

C:\etc>type hosts
127.0.0.1  www.google.com.au

C:\etc>perl -MSocket -wle "my $pip=gethostbyname('www.google.com.au');
+my $ip=inet_ntoa($pip);print $ip;"
142.250.66.195
[download]

Maybe the hosts file needs to be elsewhere and/or named something else. (I also made a copy of etc/hosts named etc/hosts.txt.)

Sorry ... I don't have much knowledge on this sort of stuff ... just reporting what I found.

Cheers,
Rob