BrowserUk:

If I understand it correctly, it's the shell that's doing the expansion for you. I suspect that system is treating the asterisk as a shell metacharacter (as described in perldoc -f system), or perhaps it's just being a bit too 'helpful' and noticing that the command is 'echo' which is a built-in command of the shell, rather than a standalone program in Windows (last time I checked).

Update: On second thought, I recall in the bad old days that DOS programs had to do the globbing themselves, and it was built into many C libraries into the startup code to simplify applications. Perhaps system is carrying this bodge forward?

...roboticus