..., but I expect better of Perl.

What would your solution be?

If you're thinking that Perl should test every SV that it passes the char* of to some system call, and examine if it contains a null byte a a position other than the last byte, and what? Die? Issue a warning? Convert the embedded null to a space?

Except of course where the embedded null is a legitimate part of a multi-byte character--which means a full unicode verification of every string passed to every system API---X, chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, fcntl, glob, ioctl, link, lstat, mkdir, open, opendir, readlink, rename, rmdir, stat, symlink, sysopen, umask, unlink, utime, etc. etc.

Just because it is possible to do something--like embedding nulls in filenames--doesn't mean that it isn't an obviously bad idea; and ham-stringing the performance of Perl and every other utility program in order to cater for idiots that ignore the obviously bad ideas, would result in today's systems running with roughly the same performance as the 40MHz cpu's that became available in the late 1980's.

Give me pragmatism over perfection every time.