Anyway, why shouldn't the Win32 perl kernel resolve this anomaly and make Windows conform to the expected behaviour?

That would be too hard. There *are* shells available on Windows that do globbing. Furthermore, even on Unix, it's possible to pass in arguments that haven't been subject to shell expansion (for instance, when called with a call from the exec family from C (or in Perl, when exec is called with more than one argument)). Trying to figure out when to do globbing, and when not is bound to get it wrong sometimes.

The bottom line is, if you want globbing, use a globbing shell.

Abigail