Y'all are kidding right ??

No, are you kidding?

Between the perlmonks latin-1 limitation , the variability of win32 filesystuems (fat/ntfs/...), and whatever you're dealing with, I don't know what you're complaining about.

It is either what you see in the console, in which case binmode something, Text::Unidecode ... whatever you want

Or the problem is the ANSI filenames you get on win32( When Unicode Does Not Happen ), in which case you need GetLongPathName or Win32::Unicode::Native

I know what I mean. Why don't you?, How do I post a question effectively?

When you're asked for clarification, it probably isn't a joke.