Thanks for the quick reply xdg. (I can't believe how quickly you came up with that!! Are you sure you waited until I hit the 'Create' button :-)

I like to have 'make clean' clean up everything and I was a little concerned that adding the 3 '*.exe.manifest' files to $options{clean} would result in warnings when 'make clean' was run on platforms where those .exe.manifest files had not been built. However, afaict, I need not have worried - on the perl builds that I've so far tested, 'make clean' seems to silently ignore any directive to clean up any files that don't exist.

I groaned at the thought of having to do something like:

if($Config{cc} eq 'cl' && $cl_version >= 
$some_critical_value) {$options{clean} = 'check.exe comp.exe version.e
+xe check.exe.manifest comp.exe.manifest version.exe.manifest}
else {$options{clean} = 'check.exe comp.exe version.exe'}
[download]

especially given that I don't know how to assign the appropriate value to $some_critical_value :-)

Thanks for the pointer(s)

Btw, the simple test case I tried was as follows:

C:\_32>type try.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Whatever ...\n");
}


C:\_32>type Makefile.PL
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;

system("cl try.c");
[download]

Running 'perl Makefile.PL' failed to create 'try.exe.manifest'. <sarcasm>And they accuse Microsoft Windows of being arcane !!!</sarcasm>

Cheers,
Rob
Update: And ++ to cdarke also for the link provided. Unfortunately, I'm unable to make use of the info provided there. This is generally the case re any info provided at a web page that begins "http://msdn...". (That's probably my inadequacy ... certainly not the fault of cdarke.)
Update: I now realise that 'cl try.c' does not result in the creation of 'try.exe.manifest', but 'cl /MD try.c' does result in the creation of 'try.exe.manifest'. (In the Makefile.PL that created the .exe.manifest files, the /MD switch was being used.)