@kennethk - Thanks for spotting the =/eq bug. My transcription error, and I should have caught it, but execution never got that far, anyway;-(

@anonymous - Thanks for your advice. So, as I suspected, my initial problem is not code but rather the cmd/perl interface.

Larry's example actually embodied a more general issue, which is my real interest: How to pass wildcards from cmd.exe to Perl? Is it feasible or is there a more effective, Perly way? (This topic generalizes and diverges somewhat from my original title. Should it begin a new thread?)