I don't have any annoying directories on my linux machine! I don't create directories with spaces in the directory name.

Me too! But what's nice is that in those rare situations in which I have to deal with (supposed to be) annoying filenames, I can do that effortlessly. I can have a file with a "\n" in it's name and the shell will expand it just as fine as any other one. Well... and if the "\n" is the first charachter? Whatever, when I'm totally lost -and it happens very rarely- mc or a tool like that comes to the rescue!

A friend of mine also used to use mc to delete (or rename, etc.) files with a leading "-". That is, before he discovered that -- ends the list of options.

In any case to keep the discussion on topic -that is, Perl- at the very worst one can use it ad hoc to deal with "exotic" filenames:

perl -e 'rename "\nbraindead\tname", "sensible_name"'
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