Many Thanks to all who replied -- my solution to the CMD.exe problem was resolved with a WinNT batch file(!) to deal with the "*.html" argument...

@echo off
:: aarunme.bat -- on an NT machine with ActiveState Perl, this fella
:: will tidy up a mirror of the Slackware Book by exploding the inner 
+table
for %%f in (*.html) do call :func1 %%f
goto :EOF
:func1
echo %1
perl -ni.bak -e "print if /Norman/ .. /\/BODY$/" %1
:: this line replaces the missing ">" for the closing body tag
echo ^> >> %1
[download]

BTW: I really should have the 2nd regex on the closing HTML tag.