This is a little late but I remembered this node when I saw the following in the File::Glob documentation. It looks like bsd_glob() would solve the whitespace issue here.

Since v5.6.0, Perl's CORE::glob() is implemented in terms of bsd_glob(). Note that they don't share the same prototype--CORE::glob() only accepts a single argument. Due to historical reasons, CORE::glob() will also split its argument on whitespace, treating it as multiple patterns, whereas bsd_glob() considers them as one pattern.