Yes - I had started off by checking most of those things. (That was how line 71 became line 76 ;-)
Everything looked fine, except that $cleaned was not defined.
It was actually quite some time before I looked at the test script itself and noticed the $^O override.

File/Spec.pm contains very little code - and it certainly seems to be inviting this override that t/01-basic.t uses.
So I decided to investigate some basic behaviour of File::Spec, without any reference to Path::Class. I used this script:

# fake_os.pl

BEGIN {
  $^O = 'Unix';
}

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Spec;

my $x = File::Spec->catfile('a', 'b', 'c');

print $x;
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I find that on both perl-5.32 and 5.34, this script outputs 'a/b/c' as expected.
If I comment out the BEGIN block, then the script outputs 'a\b\c' as expected - on both perl-5.32 and perl-5.34. What is odd is that if I simply load Test::Harness, then on both perl-5.32 and 5.34 I always get 'a\b\c' even when the BEGIN block is included:

C:\_32\pscrpt\file-spec>perl fake_os.pl
a/b/c
C:\_32\pscrpt\file-spec>perl -MTest::Harness fake_os.pl
a\b\c
[download]

I think that demonstrates that there might be some fragility around overriding $^O, though it doesn't really explain much about the behaviour of t/01-basic.t.

I think it's a pity that File::Spec invites users to mess with the path formatting by fiddling with $^O.
Surely it would be better if there was a function to call or an environment variable to set ... or something else that doesn't involve fiddling with $^O.

I think I might just file bug reports against both perl (based on the demo of the Test::Harness interference) and Path::Class ... and see where it all ends up.

I've just tried my fake_os.pl on Ubuntu with $^O = 'Win32'; and it just ignores that and gives the Unix style 'a/b/c' (on both perl-5.32 and 5.36).(I think that's intended behaviour.)
I totally buggered that up. I can get Win32 path formatting with fake_os.pl on Ubuntu if I specify $^O = 'MSWin32' .
Again, it doesn't work if the Test::Harness is loaded.
I think I'm just fiddling about with a heap of rubbish ...

Update: Forgot to mention that I did hack File::Spec on Windows perl-5.34 such that 'Unix' was hard coded in, and $^O didn't need to be altered. In that case the t/01-basic.t script ran fine and passed all tests.
To me, that shows that the problem with t/01-basic.t is not that 'Unix' formatting is being selected - it's because $^O is being messed with.
I'll post again with links to relevant bug reports once they have been filed.
Thanks for the interest that has been shown.

Cheers,
Rob

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