Many thanks to all, I believe I am starting to see the heavenly light.
It is still at the end of a long tunnel because what I really want to do in the end, is reading filenames in a directory which is a few steps away :
WWW users (presumably most on Windows workstations) drop files via drag-and-drop onto a HTTP server using DAV. The HTTP/DAV server is a Linux box. My perl script runs on a nearby Windows machine, and sees ditto Linux directories via a Samba share on the Linux machine.
So now all I have to figure out, is in which character set these filenames really are under Linux (iow what MS Explorer and DAV do to them), how this looks through the Samba share, and how my perl script eventually sees them.
But I will bear that chalice happily now that I can see that there is some heavenly principle behind it all.

In reply to Re^4: directories and charsets by soliplaya
in thread directories and charsets by soliplaya

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