I had a different Perl issue on Windows a while back and what I found that helped me might end up helping you out.

In my situation, I was trying to deal with very long paths. In Windows, there are two file system APIs. One of the APIs (used by file explorer and the command prompt) is limited to a max of 250-256 characters (I've seen different reference material with differing values) and that limitation is in place for backwards compatibility. The other API allows for use of the full capabilities of NTFS, which are significantly longer path support as well as Unicode support. Although you might not be hitting the path length issue, the Unicode support may be an issue for your code.

The module that I found that gave access to the second API is Win32::LongPath, which provides replacement functions that uses "Windows wide-character functions which support Unicode and extended-length paths". In your case, you would import Win32::LongPath into your code change your -e $path to be testL ('e', $path) instead. (See the documentation on the testL function for the list of other -x file tests that it can replace.)

Also, if you are dealing with files that have Unicode in the filenames, you may have issues with other file related tasks, such as opening the file for reading/writing or file stat tasks. The Win32::LongPath module probably should have other functions to help provide you with a work around solution.

Your understanding is correct. Everything depends on which Encoding is used to store file names in your Windows (well on Linux also, but normally Linux uses only UTF-8, but there are some exotic cases). You can try to use some standard modules mentioned by others. Or you can try to play with encodings of strings. There's very powerful and simple module Encode that comes with perl. Use that module to convert your strings to desired encoding.

There's one tricky point though. Perl can be configured to automatically apply conversion to data received from OS. That automatic conversion may be wrong and/or may confuse. In general, OS passes to perl "octets", perl may convert them to "characters" (automatically or per request). Normally when working with file names also perl has to pass to OS "octets".

So, if you know that you get data from file in UTF-8 encoding and Windows encodes file names using CP1252, then you'd have to do the following

Encode::from_to($fname, "UTF-8", "CP1252");
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$fname = Encode::encode("CP1252", $fname);
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Read through perldoc Encode to get the details.