Perhaps you could override the "built in" CORE meaning of opendir/readdir to have a version that sees all files, or allows you to specify flags somehow.

Or you could use the commandline or GUI shell to turn off the flags on all files, before running your script.

As for "can it be done", yes, use Win32 API functions instead of opendir/readdir or File::Find which uses those. Looks like Win32API::File doesn't have them. But Win32::API can do anything.

—John