Yeah, I thought I had a backslash before it. I fixed it a different way by changing the 1st arg to an explicit pattern: (this one shows the array ref):

> perl -we '    
use P;
my @x = split( m{\.}, "$ARGV[0]");
P "\nargv0=%s", "$ARGV[0]";
P "(%s)\n", \@x' "2.3"

argv0=2.3
([2, 3])
[download]

Thanks!