I expressed myself rather poorly.

What I meant to convey was my lack of understanding of the assertion in the OP of a need to escape forward slashes in the example code given in the OP, and my understanding, shared alike by all who replied in this thread, that Perl was quite happy with forward slashes in strings, paths, etc., regardless of OS, and equally happy with backslashes (if you can figure out the proper way to get them into a string) in paths under Windows.

Rather vapidly, I went off on the tangent of wittering on about the differences between the strings that Athanasius gave as examples, ignoring, if only for the moment, their equivalence as paths. Oh, well...