Thanks for the reply, I think I'm all sorted now. Fortunately the portability bit has been taken care of elsewhere, and the character encoding used by the local file system can be readily established. All that is required is to do:

sub ex {
    my $f = shift;
    my $enc = "cp1252";
    print $f;
    Encode::from_to($f, 'utf8', $enc);
    print ((-e $f) ? " exists" : " doesn't exist");
    print "\n\n";

}
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