No. Long path names are nothing to do with unicode or wide characters.

They are the opposite of "short path names" -- the 8.3 FAT compatility fudge that allows the path 'Program Files' to be accessed as 'PROGRA~1'.

As such, long path names are actually just the normal path names visible in the NTFS file space.

Hmm, it's just that Win32::GetLongPathName() returns the perl string I'd most expect in Win32-land. By "expect", I mean "jives with what I see in Windows Explorer".

Using Explorer, I created a file "snowman ☃" in a new folder "my_dir". That file was created by renaming an empty text file with "snowman " first, and then copy+pasting the snowman character. Then I ran the following:

Read more... (834 Bytes)

The results tell me that the return string from Win32::GetLongPathName() is then fit for Unicode semantics in Perl. Nevermind the underlying filesystem encoding of NTFS (UTF-16LE ? I don't know), I can now treat the path as characters from then on.

Sure, long path names are opposite of short path names. What I'm saying is that Win32::GetLongPathName() is handy to get at the characters instead of octets given by File::Find.

Hm. Doesn't seem to work for me:

C:\test\junk>dir
12/11/2010 05:58 7 acentó.txt
20/11/2010 09:46 <DIR> ελληνικά
1 File(s) 7 bytes
3 Dir(s) 236,893,585,408 bytes free

C:\test\junk>perl -E"say for glob '*'"
acent¾.txt
DC44~1

C:\test\junk>perl -E"say Win32::GetLongPathName( $_ ) for glob '*'"
acent¾.txt
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
╬Á╬╗╬╗╬À╬¢╬╣╬║╬¼

(Code tags deliberately omitted to ensure that you can see exactly what I see on my console.)

Conversely, Win32::FindFile does work for me:


C:\test\junk>perl -E"say for glob '*'"
acent�.txt
DC44~1

C:\test\junk>perl -E"say Win32::GetLongPathName( $_ ) for glob '*'"
acent�.txt
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
ελληνικά
ικά
�

C:\test\junk>perl -C0 -MWin32::FindFile -E"say for FindFile( '*' )"
.
..
acentó.txt

ελληνικά
ικά
�

---

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

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In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

The start of some sanity?