-sam

It's actually UCS-2le. UCS-2 is UTF-16's predecessor. While very similar, UCS-2 can only represent a subset of the characters that can be represented by UTF-16 because UCS-2 uses a fixed number of bytes for each char (2), while UTF-16 uses a variable number of bytes for each char (2, 4, ...?).

Update: oh, I should have read your link in more carefully. It may have changed in newer version of Windows. I wonder if wcslen (strlen for wide chars) returns a number of chars of number of bytes divided by two.

I had never heard of that. Worst still, I have never worked with utf-16. This is my first attempt:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Unicode::String qw(utf8 latin1 utf16);

my $u = utf8("C:\\Αντίγραφ&#95
+9;\\VOLINFO.TXT");
my $file = $u->utf16;

open FILE, $file or die "can't open $file: $!";
while (<FILE>) {
}
close FILE;
[download]

I only got this incomplete reaction from activeperl: can't open

You're not really using HTML entities, right? So what are you using? If you're trying to enter the characters in a text editor that might not work. Try using Perl escapes - like "\x080" - to construct your string.

Also, did you try my readdir() suggestion? I still think it could help...

-sam