I have to strongly disagree with your first point. You just need to fix your copy of Perl to expand wildcards. It sucks that ActiveState doesn't make this easy, but there are instructions in one of the FAQs. Actually, I just stuff a @ARGV=map{glob($_)}@ARGV if $^O=~/^MSWin/; at the front of scripts that take a list of file names.

It would really suck if people started following your specific advice of hardcoding <*> so that scripts could never be run on a subset of files or files from more than one directory.

See File::Spec for more advice on making scripts portable.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")