G'day Artimus,

The first thing I recommend you do is read the chdir documentation and understand how it behaves in the event of failure. Then hand-craft code to give you a customised message (when it fails) or let the autodie pragma do it for you (which is a lot less work and my preference).

I created a directory called Артём and added a few empty files for testing:

$ ls -l Артём
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 ken  staff  0 13 Mar 12:20 test1
-rw-r--r--  1 ken  staff  0 13 Mar 12:20 test2
-rw-r--r--  1 ken  staff  0 13 Mar 12:21 test3

Then I ran this example code twice: first with a non-existent directory and then with Артём:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

print 'DIR? ';
chomp(my $dir = <STDIN>);
chdir $dir;
print "$_\n" for glob './*';
[download]

Sample runs:

DIR? not_a_dir
Can't chdir('not_a_dir'): No such file or directory at ...
[download]

DIR? Артём
./test1
./test2
./test3

I suggest you try this and see what output you get.

Assuming the issue isn't that you've just mistyped the directory name, it might be related to the drive letter (C:) in the directory name. I don't have access to Perl on any MSWin systems so I can't test that for you but many others here can: report your results and, if it's a portability issue, I'm sure someone can help you.

[I used <pre>...</pre> (or <tt>...</tt>) tags where necesary to display the Cyrillic; <code>...</code> (or <c>...</c>) tags display numeric character entity references. You may need to do the same when reporting your results.]