Despite your intent to focus on just embedded spaces in file and path names, I'm compelled to point out that the problem is not just with spaces.

Microsoft also "supports" (in the sense of making it easy for various windows-based GUI tools to use) characters like ampersand, exclamation mark and semicolon. I'm not sure (I'm not a windows user), but it wouldn't surprise me if people could put asterisk, question mark, vertical bar and angle-bracket characters in file or directory names, as well. And every now and then someone can manage to get an oddball control character into a file name.

That kind of stuff can cause real havoc for unsuspecting shell-based operations. Luckily, most modern unix-like shells that have been ported to windows have the feature of automatically inserting back-slash escapes for the nasty characters when doing tab-completion of file names.

But that only applies to interactive shell usage, not sub-shells invoked by "make", etc. The multi-arg usage on system and pipeline open calls makes things somewhat easier when you get to the point of writing perl scripts, but as for handling installation of Perl (and of various CPAN modules), it can be risky business if you have funny characters in path names.

If PodMaster's patch works for things other than space, then maybe the issue is solved. Personally, I'd follow the advice as quoted in the OP: avoid putting perl in a path that is likely to cause a lot of grief for shell usage. There's just no good reason to ask for that kind of trouble.