http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=996749


in reply to Re^6: Win32/Linux portability
in thread Win32/Linux portability

To me that means that ...

No. Don't extrapolate from what the doc says. It says a special case is "when the PATTERN is either omitted or a literal string composed of a single space character (such as ' ' or "\x20")"

'.' is not a space character.