"The dir command in the Windows command shell behaves in this way, but that's no reason for the MATLAB command to do the same thing,..."
I think it's a very good reason for MATLAB to do so; it's consistent with the OS (and more than likely all dir() is doing is passing the input string to the OS command and returning its output in the consistent struct, anyway).
It's nothing new nor different, earlier releases and versions of Windows also behave the same way.
The documentation is mum on the precise subject -- it doesn't make any claims one way or t'other for the particular case.
