Have you seen what replaced the old perl -C option?

-C [number/list]
The -C flag controls some Unicode of the Perl Unicode features.

As of 5.8.1, the -C can be followed either by a number or a list of op
+tion letters. The letters, their numeric values, and effects are as f
+ollows; listing the letters is equal to summing the numbers.

    I     1    STDIN is assumed to be in UTF-8
    O     2    STDOUT will be in UTF-8
    E     4    STDERR will be in UTF-8
    S     7    I + O + E
    i     8    UTF-8 is the default PerlIO layer for input streams
    o    16    UTF-8 is the default PerlIO layer for output streams
    D    24    i + o
    A    32    the @ARGV elements are expected to be strings encoded i
+n UTF-8
    L    64    normally the "IOEioA" are unconditional,
               the L makes them conditional on the locale environment
               variables (the LC_ALL, LC_TYPE, and LANG, in the order
               of decreasing precedence) -- if the variables indicate
               UTF-8, then the selected "IOEioA" are in effect
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In my opinion this is mostly done to be compatible with C libraries, which are console-mode based.

When not in Russian but in any other encoding, including Far East, things more complicated.

Here is how I get away of the problem using OLE interface, with elder perl:

use Win32::OLE qw(in CP_UTF8);
use Win32::OLE::Const;

Win32::OLE->Option(CP=>CP_UTF8);

use Unicode::String qw/utf8/;

my $oshell = Win32::OLE->new('Shell.Application') or die "$@";
my $f = $oshell->NameSpace(Win32::GetCwd());
print "[$f]";
my $fi = $f->Items;
print $fi->Count;
print "\n";
for (0 .. $fi->Count-1) {
  my $item = $fi->Item($_);
  my $name = $item->Name;
  my $u=utf8($name);
  my $s = $u->hex;
  $s=~s/U\+00(\w\w)/my($r,$p)=((pack 'H*',$1),$&);if($r=~m(^[()\w .;\-
++!]$)){$r}else{$p}/eg;
  $s=~s/(U\+[\da-f][\da-f][\da-f][\da-f])/($1)/ig;
  my $ren=0;
  $ren=1 if $s=~/U\+(?!00)/;
  $s=~s/[ +]//g;
  print "$ren|$s\n";
  if($ren){$item->{Name}=$s}
}
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Probably you're running into the OEM vs. ANSI code pages. Just using Unicode completely eliminates that problem! There are two versions of the Windows API entry points: The -A form maps the 8-bit string based on current settings. The -W form takes a 16-bit string and doesn't mess with it.

Good idea using OLE! What is "elder perl" though?

--John

exactly right: OEM vs ANSI. But perl's open does not refer to Unicode file naming conventions, if I am right

"elder perl" is 5.6.1, when I wrote that script.
Hence use Unicode::String;