The glob function seems to work that way for me too. Here's a quick/easy work-around:

#!/opt/perl5/current/bin/perl

chdir "/tmp/test";

$CONFIG = "some_string_with_no_filename_wildcards";

@files = glob("$CONFIG");

foreach $file (@files) {
    next unless -e $file;
    print "$file \n";
}
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Or you could do it like this:

foreach $file ( grep {-e} @files ) {
    print "$file\n";
}
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UPDATE: Actually, since the whole point of the "glob()" function (and the File::Glob module that implements it) is only to do file name expansions on strings that contain various kinds of regex-like wild-card matching directives, there is no point in using this function at all when a string does not contain any of these directives.

So, if your config file uses just a simple set of wild-card-type things (like "*" and "?"), it might be better to only invoke glob() when one of those things is present in the string. Otherwise, just just the "-e" operator on the string:

@files = ( $CONFIG =~ /[*?]/ ) ? glob( $CONFIG ) : ( -e $CONFIG ) ? ( 
+$CONFIG ) : ();
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