I still can't see your point here.

As Grandfather mentioned escaping backslashes is only needed in code. Also your examples are code.

That leaves the impression that your (user editable) "configuration" actually ist code, i. e. text that is eval-ed inside your program.

That is a a bad idea by itself, with the additional observed consequence of having to be aware of perl's syntax rules in the "configuration"

I have written a lot of perl programs under Windows and they regularly read file/path names from ini like configurations. There was never a case anything had to be quoted (the perl-code-way) in that configuration files.