I don't know how much experience with the Unixoid computing world you have, but if you'd been there, you'd notice there is almost nothing in Perl that wasn't in a lesser tool before. We've all heard that Perl is derived from C, shell, awk and sed; until you've learned those tools to a significant degree you won't recognize just how much truth there is in that statement.

The number of things "chosen" amounts to very nearly zero.

As such, unlink and friends couldn't have been called any differently.

I believe that the documentation of the Unixoid assumptions in Perl called for for the folks on Windows actually needs to document a fair amount of additional concepts besides just which function names where used for Perl builtins.

(I'm twitching to keep myself from it, but cannot help commenting that the more I absorb Unix, the more Windows feels like the far overgrown quick & dirty hack of an 8080 OS it is. And I'm not even talking about the codebase (which has been done from scratch in NT anyway and would be fixable with an undue amount of effort), I'm talking about concepts. Unix, as a design, makes sense. And it's not even perfect - there's a lot to do better yet.)