In addition to what good advice Limbic~Region kyle already gave, note that in most cases Perl code on Windows can use forward slashes in path names. Consider this, tested to work even with UNC paths:

my $log = '//AIR/c$/windows/windowsupdate.log'; # "AIR" is the COMPUTE
+RNAME of one of my systems
[download]

Also note that variables are interpolated in double quotes (or in qq() expressions) and are not interpolated in single quotes (or in q() expressions).

As an additional Windows-specific tip, remember that C:\Windows is just a default. What you really want for the Windows directory to be safer is the WINDIR environment variable for the system in question. A hard-coded path will be right most of the time, though, or if you have enough control over the target machines to guarantee it.

Update: credited the wrong monk above. I'm not sure how I managed that. Sorry, kyle.