Hello all!

Thank you all for your ideas and for your discussion, which taught me some more internals abuot UTF-Handling. I hope I will be able to work in the Umlaut field without further problems.

as to the cause of the problem (as I understand it now): You gave me the correct hints: it was not the problem of readdir but the problem of $scandir.

I have a configuration xml file, which I read in using XML::Simple. $scandir is read from this file using something like my $scandir = $config->{external_systems}->{filesIN}.

Now, the config file is stored in ISO-8859-1. It seems that in this construction, $scandir is not stored as UTF, but as ISO-8859-1, although there are no umlauts in the directory name!

Now, when I concat $scandir with the result of readdir, it seems that a non-utf-value (from xml file) is concatenated with an utf value (from readdir). And as soon as there is an umlaut in the filename, the resulting string is invalid, causing "-f" to say "this is not a file".

I solved it by writing

my $scandir = …;
utf::downgrade($scandir);
[download]

Then I could successfully read, copy and move the files.

Hoping that this is the "correct" way of dealing with the problem and again thanks very much

Mike